THE DAY BEFORE the July release of Renaissance, Beyoncé’s seventh studio album, her management team announced in a press statement that the record would not include visuals as part of its rollout. “It is a chance again to be listeners and not viewers,” it read. The choice was odd, if a little disappointing, for the sole fact that Beyoncé persists as one of the foremost image-makers of our time.
The surprise release of the singer’s self-titled album, in 2013, and of Lemonade, in 2016, were accompanied by a breathtaking suite of music videos that rewrote the rules of modern artistry. (The collection of videos for Lemonade premiered as a film on HBO.) Nowadays, when she does “speak” outside of an album cycle, it is primarily through expertly curated Instagram posts, which in turn become the subject of endless fan theories. So the fact that Renaissance would enter the world without its own visual language was, well, kinda baffling.
Image culture is now the dominant record of this ever-changing, never-satisfied digital generation. We exist in and across screens. We yearn to make ourselves seen, and our most prescient social media apps allow for such an exchange. YouTube was the foundation of our looking, a bottomless video bazaar that gave everyday users the power to create what they wanted, to be who they wanted.
Instagram was, for a time, a seductress, impossible to live without. Influencers built an entire economy around the concept of being watched. More recently, TikTok has become the new frontier of cultural production, where moving images flicker across our iPhones with a persuasive, practically irresistible kineticism.
