I’ve been fascinated by the overwhelmingly positive response to this re-purposing of classic iconography, especially since just a week earlier, Beyonce’s visual album “Lemonade” was met with some skepticism when she was basically doing the same thing—collaborating with other artists and drawing on sources of inspiration in order to construct an entirely new work of visual art. While Radiohead’s creative skills are presented as innovative (In an interview with Gil Kaufman for Billboard, animator Virpi Kettu states that her collaboration with Chris Hopewell, the video’s director, was intended as a kind of warning against groupthink, especially in response to the current refugee crisis) Beyoncé’s are often interpreted as a kind of outsourcing. Even reviews that champion “Lemonade” tend to focus on Beyoncé’s collaborations as a sign of business-savvy rather than pure artistry.

In a review for ABC News, for example, Allan Raible commends the album for being ambitious, but also asserts that Beyoncé, “surrounds herself with a lot of good people” and that “Beyoncé and her producers both know how to quote and sample well.” In fact, Beyoncé’s considerable success is often seen to be in direct tension with her ability to be taken seriously as an artist. At The Daily Beast, Kevin Fallon praises the power of “Lemonade," but also raises concerns:

"You can’t talk about this album without acknowledging its surprising vulgarity and language, which Beyoncé is absolutely entitled to use in her art and her expression of womanhood, but, because of her public primness and often calculated nature we see her in, can seem inauthentic. In the same way her assorted genre mastery can seem like an artist not committed to a singular voice, the explicit content, from her mouth, can seem more theatrical than genuine."

It’s hard to imagine a male artist receiving this same level of criticism for being “inauthentic”—after all, both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had heavily constructed images, and are seen as consummate musical geniuses. But for female artists, the bigger, wealthier, and more powerful they get, the more we question whether they are contributing anything of value at all. Artists like Madonna, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé may be upheld as great businesswomen, but their financial success is also seen as somehow diminishing their potential for artistic greatness. It’s a type of criticism rarely levelled at talented male artists like Radiohead, even when they also operate in positions of incredible power. In an article for The Guardian, Alex Marshall notes how Radiohead’s keen sense for business is not seen at odds with their artistic identity: