Kelly charged with 10 counts of sexual abuse posts video: ‘This is how I got to get paid now. So I got to go do this event’

After asking the media to “take it easy”, R Kelly gave a 28-second performance at a club in Springfield, Illinois, in the small hours of Sunday morning. He then spent about half an hour mixing with fans who paid $50 to $100 to see him.

Related: The debate: should Spotify ban R Kelly and Michael Jackson?

The TV interview was the singer’s chance to refute the sexual abuse claims. But an angry man towering over a seated woman is never a good look

It is typical now, whenever an immediately important photograph appears, for Twitter to start drawing Fibonacci spirals over it and declare it an accidental Renaissance work, whether it is Angela Merkel standing over a truculent Trump, or that brilliantly debauched New Year’s Eve scene from Manchester a few years ago. Many were similarly quick to point out the pristine golden ratio of Lazarus Jean-Baptiste’s shot of the US TV presenter Gayle King interviewing R Kelly in his first media engagement since he was charged with 10 counts of sexual abuse (including nine against three victims aged between 13 and 17) in February.

In the throes of denying the charges and numerous other, similar allegations, Kelly stands in the right-hand third of the frame, wrathful, shouting, pointing into the studio lights, as undone as the dismantled coffee cup at his feet. Standing slightly towards the back of the shot, he almost appears to be levitating with the force of his anger. On the left, King remains sitting, staring forward, as calm and still in the face of Kelly’s performance as the bottle of water by her chair. While the image’s proportions are perfectly in line with Renaissance composition, Jean-Baptiste’s undeniably artful shot seems drawn from a more prosaic school: its depiction of male power and aggression is so textbook, it could come straight out of a stock imagery catalogue.