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

The video takes two tracks, All Day and I Feel Like That, from the rapper's upcoming album Swish!

It is not shocking for Kanye West to appear in a gallery exhibit: the rapper has always run the gamut of high and low art, populist and elitist (Getty)

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.

Hooray for Henry

The same goes for another short film I saw last week – not about a rapper, but about a lonely hedgehog called Henry. Henry can’t seem to make friends because he likes to hug – he’s a hedgehog; you do the maths. The film, also called Henry, is the second animated short from the virtual reality (VR) film-makers at Oculus Story Studio, and to watch it I had to wear an Oculus Rift VR headset.

Like Kanye and McQueen’s film, Henry unfolds in a single “shot” at Henry’s house during his birthday party, which is attended only by balloon animals. The 360-degree VR surroundings are filled with fabulous detail: a ladybird buzzing around your head, a splatter of dropped cake icing that’s so convincing you can almost taste it. Though the viewer can’t alter the action, Henry acknowledges your presence in the room with knowing looks from his big, watery eyes – like a friendlier Frank Underwood from House of Cards (though I know which of them I’d rather hug).

The good folks at Story Studio suggest VR will allow movie viewers to develop emotional bonds with characters that are even deeper than those they already enjoy with the 2D heroes of Toy Story or Frozen – and they might just be right. But I did have one question that they seemed unable to answer: what happens when you get tears in your eyes while you’re wearing a VR headset?

Life after Bambi

It’s 73 years since Bambi was the first wide-eyed woodland creature to become a tear-jerking animated movie star. But did you know that timid little fawn, skidding clumsily across the ice and learning to say “bird” and “butterfly”, grew up to be a US marine? In an interview with NPR last week, 80-year-old Donnie Dunagan, who saw combat during his 20 years in the corps, admitted he was too embarrassed ever to tell his colleagues about his previous career as a child voiceover artist.

They found out anyway. As Dunagan was on the brink of retirement, a superior assigned him a thankless task. When he complained, Dunagan recalled, the general “pulled his glasses down like some kind of college professor. There’s a big, red, top-secret folder that he got out of some safe somewhere that had my name on it. He pats this folder, looks me in the eye and says, ‘You will ... Won’t you, Major Bambi?’”.

Share and share alike

I recently became a father for the first time, and – as wonderful as the experience has been – the wealth and variety of parenting assistance, literature and unsolicited advice available means I’ve had very few genuine surprises in the months since my daughter was born. But if there’s one thing that I feel nobody told me about beforehand, it’s the emotional hurdles that prospective parents have to clear before they even get close to the delivery room – a period that’s typically glossed over in polite conversation with that icky, insufficient term: “trying”.

This week, Facebook chief executive and professional sharer Mark Zuckerberg announced that he and his wife Priscilla Chan are expecting their first baby. In his post, Zuckerberg also revealed that it had taken them two years and three miscarriages to get to this point, and said he hoped that imparting his experience would “help more people feel comfortable sharing their stories as well”.

I’m afraid having a child of my own hasn’t made me any more interested in Facebook albums full of other people’s. And 75 pictures of Jethro’s first birthday party are probably the last thing any couple in the throes of attempted conception wants to see. But if more people choose to tell their stories of “trying”, failing and trying again, then those are posts that I’d be glad to find on my feed.