All of the art, artists and art institutions name checked on Jay-Z's "Picasso Baby"

Mike Boyle
Jul 11, 2013 10:55PM

Via the hip-hop lyric annotation site rapgenius.com (don’t click if dirty words make you sad), the track mentions:

Pablo Picasso (duh)

Mark Rothko 

“a billion Jeff Koons balloons”

George Condo 

ROA 

Christie’s 

the MoMA 

Francis Bacon 

Jean-Michel Basquiat 

Andy Warhol 

Art Basel 

Leonardo da Vinci 

Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tisci

the Met Museum 

the Louvre 

the Tate Modern 

the Mona Lisa 

the nombre d’or (French for the “golden ratio”

Maison Martin Margiela*

SAMO (a graffiti tag used by Basquiat and others)

* A French designer of incredibly upsetting masks with no eye or mouth holes; a diamond-encrusted Margiela mask was worn onstage by Kanye West during a recent performance in Atlantic City. How he managed to perform rap music in a mask with no mouth hole is unknown to this writer.

Mike Boyle