Should the Mona Lisa Go Underground? The Web Weighs In
The Louvre has proposed moving 'the world's most disappointing masterpiece' to create a better viewing experience. Online commenters have their own suggestions.
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (ca. 1503-06). Oil on poplar, 77 x 53 cm. Courtesy Musée du Louvre.
The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world, so ubiquitous and oversaturated that The Guardian recently compared it to Taylor Swift.
It's also the world's most disappointing masterpiece according to recent research that scraped over 18,000 online reviews of 100 famous artworks.
Leonardo da Vinci's painting had the highest percentage of negative mentions (37.1%), more than Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (34.5%), also at the Louvre, and Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory (31.2%) at MoMA, New York.
Viewers are frequently frustrated by long queues to briefly see the work in a scrum of tourists.
(It's exactly this problem that teamLab solved with their phenomenally popular installations, which can be viewed from any angle and are brought to life, rather than hindered, by other viewers.)
'We don't welcome visitors very well in this room, so we feel we're not doing our job properly,' Louvre director Laurence des Cars said in response to the research. 'Moving the Mona Lisa to a separate room could put an end to public disappointment.'
Vincent Delieuvin, the Louvre's chief curator of 16th-century painting, told French newspaper Le Figaro that there's unanimous support for the move.
'It's a large room, and the Mona Lisa is at the back, behind its security glass, so at first glance it looks like a postage stamp,' he said.
News that the painting might be moved to her own underground chamber went art-world-viral, receiving over 16,000 upvotes on Reddit.
The 'most controversial' comment on Reddit came from user Less_Party.
'Just reproduce a subtly larger one each year until eventually you have one that's a metre across so people can actually see the world's most overrated painting without having to get within 15 cm of it,' they said.
The most upvoted comment was made by emduggs, who said, 'the Louvre is one of the best museums to get lost in—especially if you go up into the French and Dutch sections. I wish more people took the time to enjoy the museum instead of treating it like a checklist.' —[O]
