Jay-Z Is Rapping the Same Song for Six Hours Straight at an Art Gallery

Magna Carta Holy Grail's maestro is currently deep into a performance art piece

By John Boone Jul 10, 2013 9:27 PMTags
Jay Z, InstagramInstagram

Wake your ass up, Tilda Swinton, and get out of that glass box. This is performance art we can get behind: Jay-Z is currently "rapping" a song off his new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, at a museum and will do so nonstop for six hours.

Hova is currently at the Pace Gallery in New York where he's lip-syncing the track "Picasso Baby" on repeat while cameras film (presumably to later be turned into a music video).

On the track, Jay-Z dubs himself the modern day Pablo Picasso and laments, "I just want a Picasso, in my casa / No, my castle."

(For the record, he revealed in his Twitter Q&A that he's still waiting for that Picasso, but "my birthday is DEC 4 though." Hopefully his buddies can go halfsies and get him "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.")

The track is packed with artist name drops—from Andy Warhol ("Surrounded by Warholds / my whole team ball") to Mark Rothko ("I wanna Rothko, no I wanna brothel / No, I want a wife to f--k me like a prostitute." Bet you didn't know that about Beyoncé, did ya?)—so it seems fitting that Jay would turn to an unconventional medium for this video.

In the Q&A, he was also asked if he'd been working on any visuals for the album yet. He wrote back, "yes, 6 pieces of art." Welcome to one of them. We can't imagine what the other five are.

New fans and spectators are brought in on the hour. Judd Apatow and Girls star Adam Driver were in attendance, as was fellow performance artist Marina Abramovic. Abramovic's usual shtick is staring at people silently until they cry, it doesn't look like she made Jay-Z cry today.

No sign of Beyoncé or Blue Ivy in the crowd yet. Unrelated, but also no sign of Beyoncé officially releasing a new single yet. Girl, can you put "Grown Woman" on iTunes already? Please?!