One very clear portrait emerges from any analysis of the cover of Magna Carta.
The result was something that not too many people felt they could grok or relate to, no matter Jay-Z's best intentions. But what exactly does the cover mean? The statue had Jay-Z's name in big, black, block letters on top of it, and a black censorship rectangle on top of his name and the sculpture. Jay-Z's video for the album's second track, "Picasso Baby," was filmed at the Pace Gallery, set to a live background audience, and featured Jay-Z and legendary Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović.Īll in all, it seemed Jay-Z was trying to analogize classic art with a modern incarnation of artistic expression: hip-hop by way of Jay-Z. It featured a sculpture later discovered to be Alpheus and Arethusa by 16th-century Italian sculpture Battista di Domenico Lorenzi housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, per Complex. The album's cover, in particular, caused a bit of head-scratching at the time of its release. The Timbaland-produced album, Jay-Z's first since 2009's The Blueprint 3 (with its key track, "Empire State of Mind"), was a "hedge-betting, black-tie/Black Card affair," as Pitchfork said, and featured a gallery of luxury hip-hop collaborators such as Swizz Beatz, Pharrell, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, and Nas. Pretentious, portentous "dad rap" written by a "bored first-class denizen on his fourth Bloody Mary ordering opulent, au courant, marvelously vapid beats out of a SkyMall catalog." Ouch. Holy Grail, critics were particularly savage, as The Atlantic recounts.
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