Kanye West's latest music video directed by Steve McQueen wins an exhibition space in LA museum

For four days last week, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) played host to what might seem an unlikely exhibit: Kanye West’s latest music video. The promo for twin tracks “All Day” and “I Feel Like That”, from Kanye’s forthcoming album Swish!, was filmed by Steve McQueen, the director of the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, and premiered at Paris Fashion Week in March.


For the first half of the video – shot in a single take in a big, bare room at Chatham Dockyard in Kent – musician and camera circle and harass one another, echoing the aggressive tone and tempo of “All Day”. The gallery notes compare this to “a meeting between the bull and the matador”, though watching it I felt as if I’d just hit on Kim and was now being pursued by her drunk, angry husband. For the moodier, more melancholic “I Feel Like That”, Kanye collapses knackered against a wall and is filmed breathing heavily in a steady, extreme close-up.

It’s not incongruous to find McQueen’s work at LACMA: before he was a film director, he was a Turner Prize-winning video artist. Nor is it shocking for Kanye to appear in a gallery exhibit: the rapper has always run the gamut of high and low art, populist and elitist. What’s really surprising is to see a music video once more elevated to event status. In the age of YouTube, such promos are so ubiquitous as to feel commonplace, however big the budget or the star. Kanye’s latest is a raw, stripped-down affair, but the fact that you can’t watch it online lends it a rare prestige.