This is such a peculiar, and I have to say, snobby, criticism - especially towards the last part of the article.
The Gioconda is too famous and doesn't deserve the crowd it gets? Maybe. Sounds like a subjective judgement.
People are left disappointed? Maybe. But anyone who does a 10 second search for "is mona lisa worth seeing" should already be aware of that. If they still choose to do that, why should we stop them? (or force them into an overly commercialized pen that deprives a piece of art of its dignity)
By all means, the Louvre should optimize the queuing experience. But as the author admitted, the Louvre doens't have a space capacity issue. And in my books anything that gets more people into a museum of any sort is a good thing.
Although I don't like the tone of the article, it does have a point.
Whether or not most of the Louvre visitors are there only for Mona Lisa, most will want to at least see it, whereas the rest of the museum is diverse enough to never be too crowded.
Moving that painting elsewhere would probably make it an immensely better experience for visitors who aren't coming for it. The entrance queues would not be that long, and past these queues, as long as you avoid that room the museum is more than large enough not to be crowded.
So let those who want to see the painting see it, and let those who want to the see the rest of the museum see it. People can do both of course, but there's no need to ask people who just want to see Mona Lisa to navigate the museum.
I'm surprised the Louvre hasn't done just that. Currently the Mona Lisa is pretty much in the middle of a section devoted to French and Italian paintings. Which makes sense, but doesn't work well in practice. The Mona Lisa crowds can get so big it's hard to even get a look at the other painting in the same room.
Move it to a separate room, install turnstiles that limit the amount of people in the room to something reasonable, and it will be a better experience for everyone. Even the people who are only there to take a picture of the Mona Lisa will be able to do it faster.
Many other museums seem better at limiting the amount of people near some attraction. To see Da Vinci's next most famous work, The Last Supper, you purchase a ticket that corresponds to a 15-minute slot. The Bust of Nefertiti, one of the most famous antique items, is kept in a separate room of the Neues Museum, with the staff not letting people in if it gets too crowded.
This sounds like a very sensible idea. Why not move it to its own area where the tourist crowds can have their selfies and, if they're done at that point, go do something else without clogging things up for the rest of the visitors?
From what little I've been exposed to about art management, it's also not great for the works in general to have crowds around them - aside from obvious things like people touching them, it puts an extra burden on the climate control system.
> it puts an extra burden on the climate control system
The Louvre doesn't have climate control throughout the compound. There's some sections that have it. But during August one should expect their visit to be fairly sweltering.
They could do what the UK does with the crown jewels and literally install a conveyor belt system that makes it nearly impossible to stand there for long periods of time.
Another option is to charge a dynamic fee to see the painting based on crowd size.
La Joconde has been at the Louvre since 1797. Since 1878, it has been displayed in the Salle des États - a room originally used by Napoleon III for legislative sessions. As you mention, the room hosts many Venetian works, and has been recently renovated to complement the paintings it showcases. For instance, the walls were painted a deep Prussian blue to contrast with the golden frames and highlight the vivid pigments typical of these works.
This legacy and continuity matter to the curators and art historians who maintain the museum.
As part of the renovations, the flow of the room was redesigned to accommodate for the fact that visitors spend more time in front of the Joconde (curators mention that a visitor spends on average 50 seconds looking at La Joconde, versus 4 seconds for other paintings).
I was at the Louvre for the first time just a couple weeks ago. The Mona Lisa room was so crowded that I didn't bother lining up or looking at anything else in the room. Definitely a bad experience for people who don't like crowded museums.
I'm not that familiar with museum design or their funding mechanisms, but for logistical purposes, sometimes if you want a lot of foot traffic in your building, you make people navigate around to see the "crown jewels" so-to-speak which forces/exposes them to other items of interest you want to "sell" (taxpayers, government, private market...).
If you need to count beans for some government funding agency to justify your budget, this is a way to inflate bean count and prop up underperforming aspects. As long as it's a situation that isn't incredibly wasteful and done in good taste, I support it--though this is of course highly subjective.
If you break that number up so it's easier to see why people visit (e.g., separating the Mona Lisa), it may inadvertantly give justification to cut funding to the other aspects in many modern mindsets. Mixing the artworks up artificially inflates other works foot traffic that, I would argue, is a positive form of trickery for society (preservation and education of the arts, something important and often underfunded).
Museums that attract a lot of tourists are geared towards moving people in and out as fast as possible. The longer they are in the house the fewer tickets you can sell.
Milk is in the back because they have to maintain the cold chain, and the refrigeration is in the back. Putting it anywhere else risks spoilage if a pallet takes too long to unload or gets left unattended.
There's definitely a lot of dripping condescension in that piece. That said, yeah, I think it's substantially correct. If the Mona Lisa is going to attract such outsized crowds--and, in my experience, they are outsized compared to a work of art in any other museum I've been to--you'd do both the art and the crowds a favor by separating it and putting it in an environment to optimize viewing and provide context/educational background.
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam did just that. There is a 'tourist path' where all the must-see famous works are shown, predictably, everybody goes by in single file so they can put a checkmark on their instagram account or whatever they use to show they've 'been there'. And then there is a huge collection of lesser known but worthwhile works in the rest of the museum. And - unfortunately - vaults full of art that likely will not see the light of day for a very long time because of lack of exposition space.
> And - unfortunately - vaults full of art that likely will not see the light of day for a very long time because of lack of exposition space.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna currently has an exhibition on called Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and other Treasures, by Wes Anderson and Juman Malouf. Neither of them are museum professionals, so their choices of which objects to display and how to arrange them differ quite notably from what one might normally see in the museum, even though they're drawn from the same collection. I found it a very interesting and enjoying experience.
Ironically, this would be elevating the status of the Mona Lisa by giving its own museum. Sometimes you have to do nonsensical things to achieve logical goals.
The article is sort of a whine even if I also sort of agree with it. The crush around the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, a museum with so many great works of art, is really a bit silly. And, if the Mona Lisa weren't famous in no small part for being famous (and, admittedly, for being one of a relatively modest number of works by Da Vinci), it's unlikely that most people would give the small portrait a second glance.
Now, knowing it's famous, one can appreciate some of the justification for it. But it still wouldn't make at least my list of favorite paintings.
I have the feeling a lot of people go visit a popular thing just because they know it's popular, and not for its actual art, meaning, experience or whatever.
I actually tend to avoid the most crowded attractions. Been to Paris several times, but never been to the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre (but the Arc de Triomphe and the Montmartre are cool places to visit).
FWIW, the Eiffel Tower is cool as hell up close. I find it really neat to be able to see the structure of a fairly large building up close. TBH I was more "disappointed" by the Arc de Triomphe.
I've always deliberately avoided the Eiffel Tower myself. The Louvre is very much worth visiting even if it's largely frozen in time and the most exquisite works are sort of overwhelmed by the vast numbers of technically excellent but IMO often not terribly interesting paintings. (How many Renaissance Madonna and Childs can you look at in a day?) TBH, a more curated Louvre would be a more interesting museum.
That said, if I'm having to choose, I'm probably going to the Musee d'Orsay rather than the Louvre.
Exactly! That's why I use Haskell instead of JavaScript, and Arch Linux instead of MacOS. Those other things are too popular and people use them without understanding the real _meaning_ of Computer Science.
And I can appreciate that even when it's not my favorite, it can still be beautiful.
The fact is, as an artist, it's hard not to look at paintings by Picasso or Van Gogh and think, "Wow, they had such a big impact on me. I wanted to be like that."
That's part of the magic of the artist's brush — that it can so easily and effortlessly paint such a dramatic scene that you, the viewer, think you can be the same person as the artist.
As an artist, I'm very aware of how big the influence of an artist is. And as an individual, I'm extremely aware of how much an artist can influence me. That's why I'm very interested in people who can have the biggest impact on other people through their art.
I've never in my life searched for "is X worth seeing", the thought hasn't even crossed my mind. That is maybe not very smart, but before I see it I can't decide it, why would I trust random strangers on the internet? :)
Because there's not many other choices, and the other choices are way more work. And because as a general guide they seem to work pretty well, especially if you read through them with some small amount of care.
> But as the author admitted, the Louvre doens't have a space capacity issue. And in my books anything that gets more people into a museum of any sort is a good thing.
They really need to do the grocery store thing and make you walk past everything in the museum before letting you into the Mona Lisa at the far back.
They pretty much already do this. The end result is tourists literally running to the room the Mona Lisa is in once they get inside the museum. It's madness.
In the era of the Internet, you don't even have to look up "is mona lisa worth seeing". Just by looking up "mona lisa" you can see what the painting looks like. Voilà.
On the other hand just the fact that most people who go there to see it take pictures of it with their mobile phones means that they don't even go to the Louvre to see it, they just want to show others they've seen it.
It's in poor taste to superciliously diss the community while participating in it. Since you're commenting here, you're as much "HN" as anyone else is.
The Gioconda is too famous and doesn't deserve the crowd it gets? Maybe. Sounds like a subjective judgement.
People are left disappointed? Maybe. But anyone who does a 10 second search for "is mona lisa worth seeing" should already be aware of that. If they still choose to do that, why should we stop them? (or force them into an overly commercialized pen that deprives a piece of art of its dignity)
By all means, the Louvre should optimize the queuing experience. But as the author admitted, the Louvre doens't have a space capacity issue. And in my books anything that gets more people into a museum of any sort is a good thing.