Last week, there was a piece on Hyperallergic on pop music’s love affair with contemporary art that inspired us to do some digging. Yayoi Kusama à la Nicky Minaj specifically made us optimistic that modern pop music cares enough about art to stage such elaborate recreations — although, a little credit where credit is due would be nice. That said, down the rabbit hole we went. Here are a few of the standout music videos doing that pay homage to visual artists, with various aesthetic and legal results. What did we miss?
As nodded to by Hyperallergic, Nicki Minaj dropped “The Boys (feat. Cassie)” just last month. Half of the video’s shots take place in a very, very Yayoi-ish obsessively-polka dot chamber, but hued in hot Barbie pink instead of red, naturally. Therein, Nicki dons polka dot pants with a tight woven yellow-black color pattern almost identical to the one on the press cards of the artist’s recent Whitney Museum career retrospective. Nicki’s legs could be one of Yayoi’s psychedelic sculptural tendrils. Looking at the bright, bombastic, stylin’ Yayoi now and back in the day, we can see why Minaj would want to imitate.
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