How about instead, you put a bunch of larger copies of the Mona Lisa in there, peppered around the building. The people who just want selfies can pick any of them and it’ll look as legit as the actual thing. Then have the real one off in another room with a wait list, and only a few people get to enter at a time.
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Counterproposal: scatter ten exactly replicas around the museum, and randomly substitute the real one on a rolling basis.
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Why? Because only people who can afford an education should have access to world heritage culture?
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Those are excellent!
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A persuasive argument for taking down the Mona Lisa
A more persuasive argument for keeping it up: $$$$$$$
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Your uncle is very talented. Thanks for sharing.
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No matter where you put the Mona Lisa, the exhibit will be a mosh pit because most people are selfish clods. There are just too many people trying to catch a glimpse. This painting has somehow become the end-all of painting in the minds of the common herd, which I’ll never understand. There’s a galaxy of work that is much better. It’s not even Leonardo’s best work. But it’s a kind of Mecca for the semiliterate. A lot of people have the idea that if they see it, they’ve somehow proven they are not uncultured ignorant boors. But their actions when they go to see it prove otherwise.
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Never been to the Louvre, but saw the Prado’s Mona Lisa. There were no lines, no crowds. In fact it was mostly ignored for other more famous paintings
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ETA: @Brainspore I love those paintings, especially the interplay with the spectators and the people in the paintings. I could stare at these all day long. Monsa Lisa, not so as much.
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I think it’s more one of those ‘ticking off a box’ moments. The Mona Lisa has come to symbolize Art and is one of the most recognizable, well-known paintings in the world. When people visit Paris, seeing such an iconic painting is on just about everyone’s list, since it’s a painting they’ve seen since they were kids. It’s kind of amazing to see the real thing once in your life.
Then again, you could assume everyone who wants to see it is “semiliterate”.
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Have it in a separate building with a shifting hall of mirrors, with several separate channels that give you the illusion it’s right in front of you. This way everyone imagines they might have been right next to it.
Disclaimer: I may not know what I’m talking about it, as it might be physically impossible, but it was fun to think about in my head.
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iirc Leonardo’s The Madonna of the Rocks is about 50 meters away from Mona, with almost nobody around it.
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my wife and i went 10 years ago. it was truly insane. a loud, surly crowd in front of the painting. the painting behind some kind of glass protecting it from light rays which created a surface that auto-focus on cameras concentrated on making the painting itself out of focus or, if you switched to manual focus with my camera, and focused on the painting it created moire patterns over the painting. i ended up taking pictures of the crowd and then pictures of the painting across from it, the enormous wedding at cana which could easily have worked as a backdrop for the 5 or 6 people looking at it instead of the other. it was like looking at art on a tokyo subway during rush hour.
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That sounds like something out of a Dan Brown book 
Maybe a huge magnifying screen could be set up in front of the picture so that it can be in viewed minute detail from 10’ away.
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At this point, the scrum around La Joconde is at least half of the point of going to see it. It’s been reproduced so many times that people are very familiar with the image itself. The only extra thing you get from seeing the real thing, is the experience of the crowd, and taking part in the century-spanning story of the most famous painting in the world.
Of course, for sheer spectacle, the Louvre has many more impressive sights than this. A few minutes walk away from this you can be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the long galleries of French Romantic and Patriotic paintings- as if they had decided to load a cannon with Delacroix and fire it at you.
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I was in Paris around 2005 and spent a few hours wandering around the Louvre looking for other things. I ended up in some room, turned around, saw the Mona Lisa there, tried to look past the mob, then just moved on. I mean, it’s an ok painting, but having studied art history there were much more interesting works in that building I wanted to see in the time available, so it wasn’t worth jockeying for a anxious glimpse.
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I’m actually genuinely surprised they don’t simply put one or two high-quality enlargements off to the side so that people can take selfies, look up close, etc. I remember seeing a technique in which paintings could be reproduced with a laser-scan of the surface that could capture the paint texture as well. Let people hang out with the Mona Lisa in 2x repro form, I bet that’d help siphon off crowds from the actual painting.
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I like that blonde woman in the front row of the second one, patiently trying to actually look at the art on display. The people around her probably HATE her for standing there.
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Fine art moshing? Of course, the Museum of Modern Art offers stage diving too.
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It’s more that people trying to see the other nice paintings in the same room are completely drowned out byt the selfie takers as well.
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