Jay Z rolled out a number of unique initiatives to help promote his Magna Carta Holy Grail album in 2013. From his #newrules twitter spree, to using Samsung as the release platform, to doing live performance art for the filming of his "Picasso Baby" music video. Although he attempted to carve out some new rules, not everyone was happy with the result. Plenty of Samsung users were frustrated by their experience using the MCHG app, and it turns out fans weren't the only ones upset-- performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose performance art inspired Jay Z's "Picasso Baby" video, also left feeling extremely frustrated.
Abramovic spoke to Spike in a new interview, and revealed how Jay Z didn't fulfil his end of the deal. Hov adapted Abramovic's "The Artist is Present" for the "Picasso Baby" music video, which was shot at the Pace Gallery in NYC. Abramovic even attended the live performance and appeared in the visual, along with random fans and strangers. According to the artist herself, she consented to the adaptation as long as Jay contributed to her art institute, which it appears he did not do.
"I am very pissed by this, since he adapted my work only under one condition: that he would help my institute. Which he didn’t," she said. "The day before, he came to my office and I gave him an entire power point presentation and said: okay, you can help me, because I really need help to build this thing. Then he just completely used me. And that wasn’t fair."
"And in the end it was only a one-way transaction," she said later on. "I will never do it again, that I can say. Never. I was really naive in this kind of world. It was really new to me, and I had no idea that this would happen. It’s so cruel, it’s incredible. I will stay away from it for sure."
We'll have to see if this elicits some sort of response from Jay. What do you think?