Madame Tussauds Is Accused Of “Whitewashing” Beyoncé
Have you ever been to a really bad, off-brand wax museum? They have them all over the world. I’ve been to a few, because I love terrible things. However, I’ve never been to Madame Tussauds. I just always assumed that they had some quality standards to live up to, given their name recognition and popularity. Personally, I have no desire to see an accurate representation of what Tom Cruise looks like in real life, or to take a fake selfie with Forrest Gump. I’m into outsider art, not tourists traps.
But then that version of Beyoncé (courtesy of Hip Hop Weekly) happened.
Hat’s off, Madame Tussauds (MT) artists, that is deliciously awful! As you can imagine, people #tooktotwitter with a quickness, calling out MT’s laughable vision of Beyoncé, which TMZ is calling “White Chicks Bey.” If you love Twitter like I do (again, outsider art!), you should go out and have yourself a field day reading the responses this situation has generated. Of course, MT got wind of the hullabaloo and responded to TMZ:
Our talented team of sculptors takes every effort to ensure we accurately colour match all of our wax figures to the celebrity being depicted. Lighting within the attraction combined with flash photography may distort and misrepresent the colour of our wax figures.
Well then how come the real Beyoncé still looks black under “attraction lighting” and flash photography? Does the wax have reflectors melted into it or something? Is wax racist? Sad truth is this whole story will be sending visitors in droves into MT to test out this theory. While they are there, they need to test out the Oprah and the Denzel Washington and let us know if MT is full of shit, or what.
As a very tangentially related side-note, while trying to think of good jokes about this story, I thought about the music video for Lionel Richie’s Hello, where a blind student makes a really creepy clay bust of Lionel and goes “this is how I see you” and starts rubbing all over his face. That reminded me that when I was living in L.A., I took a voice class at Los Angeles City College, and every time I came into the classroom, I’d get a really funky deja-vu feeling. I couldn’t shake it all semester, until one day it fucking hit me like a ton of bricks. IT WAS THE SAME ROOM WHERE THEY FILMED LIONEL’S VIDEO!!! Only in L.A.!
Pic: Twitter