I’ll say this right off the top. I’ve always wanted to see the Mona Lisa. You hear so much about it, which I guess is the problem. My wife has seen it and wasn’t impressed and can’t understand why anyone would go out of their way for the painting. But it’s long been one of those “bucket list” items.
Then there was this. An art critic for the New York Times wrote an article this week that had a lot of people doing a double take. It was titled “It’s Time To Take Down The Mona Lisa”. It may sound strange for an art critic to call for taking down one of the world’s great paintings, but he had his reasons. It is sort of tied in to the fact that the Mona Lisa has also been voted as the world’s most disappointing attraction in a recent survey.
The big thing is, the Louvre, which houses the Mona Lisa, is a pretty busy spot anyway. Then you have all these people who want to see this painting they’ve heard so much about. So you stand in a line, to get to another line, then you finally get to the painting, but you’re still ten feet away in the middle of a crowd with security trying to keep the line moving… end result… you really don’t get a good chance to actually see the painting. You can say you were there. You can snap a quick selfie. But you’re not getting the chance to really study that smile or try to figure out why the background doesn’t match.
Basically, the Mona Lisa has become an attraction for the sake of being an attraction. This writer described it as like a holy icon. It’s a mob scene that gets worse as more people feel the need to say they were there.
It’s like that with a lot of things, particularly in our world of constantly seeing people online telling how great some of these things are. You can probably think of several yourself. Places and things that have been praised by others and it makes you want to go see for yourself. But when you get there, you wonder what all the fuss was about.
The idea put forward was to move the Mona Lisa to some place on it’s own, so the selfie seeking mobs can go there and leave the rest of the museum to people who would really like to study what’s there.
It’s an interesting problem many museums would love to have… too many people.
I’d love to see the Mona Lisa, but not under those conditions. Maybe I need a different sort of bucket list. Things I really want to see and do, and things that would be nice if the conditions are right. Besides… there’s a picture of it right there.
