Mosh Pits for Mona

The Crowds
The Louvre saw 8.3 million visitors last year. If you are interested in adding yourself to that number, here’s the perfect day NOT to go: on a rainy Saturday in mid-August at the height of Paris’ tourist season. I learned this lesson the hard way. On said day, I believe I saw 8 million of the museum’s yearly visitors. I was surrounded by herds of tourist groups of various shapes and sizes and observed as they shuffled lethargically through crowded renaissance painting-adorned hallways towards their target destination. They loafed through hundreds of pieces of overwhelmingly exquisite artwork, unsure of what to look at and photograph along the way.

Everyone was headed to visit a slightly-smirking lady with calmly folded hands, smooth, yellowy skin, and a hint of cleavage. They’d all seen her face a hundred times, on postcards and magnets, in caricature and cartoons, with a mustache and a goatee à la Duchamp, or screen-printed in primary colors à la Warhol. Now, all of these visitors had made their pilgrimage to see the world’s most commonly reproduced painting live and in the canvas flesh.

The funny thing about visiting the Mona Lisa is that you can’t even really see the painting. The sacred 30 x 20 inch canvas is under maximum security- two guards stand on either side of the wooden railing that encircles the bulletproof glass chamber that holds the piece. A second set of railings restricts the crowds from getting any closer than twenty feet. If you’re not one for pushing through crowds, you’re standing on your tiptoes, holding your camera above rows of heads, zooming in and clicking. Then, on the screen of your digital camera you can look at Mona the same way you’ve always looked at her: as a reproduction.

I’m not going to broach the subject of why Da Vinci’s painting of a lady with an enigmatic smile is now considered the most famous painting in the world. The answers were not apparent to me when I looked at the painting, and I would venture to guess that the rest of the crowd onlookers were not savvy to an explanation, either. What I did experience when I looked at the painting was a sensation that I was not looking at piece of art; rather I was looking at an icon that has come to represent art.

The scale of the Mona Lisa’s reproductions has abstracted the painting from being a piece of art and transformed the piece into a symbol of “art” as an institution. When visitors see the Mona Lisa, they are there to affirm that beneath the reproductions, the original exists. Although the painting’s simplicity is perhaps disappointing to visitors expecting to understand why this particular painting is the world’s most famous, it is also comforting to see that the original piece is not more striking or more powerful than its countless reproductions. The fact that the replicas are accurate representations of the original is reassuring in a world that feeds information through secondary sources, abstractions, and symbols.