Crowds give life to the Paris museum and the painting is a silent, compelling mystery at the heart of the hubbub
What a wonderful headache for a museum to have. The Louvre in Paris gets so many visitors it is taking drastic measures to cope, which include moving its most famous treasure to a dedicated space where fans can visit without entering the main museum at all. It will no longer suck the oxygen from other art. Nearly 9 million visitors a year stream through the Louvre and it’s believed 80% of them are looking for Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, better known as La Gioconde, better still as the Mona Lisa.
I’m worried the Louvre is trying to solve a problem that is not really a problem. Ask Britain’s museums if high visitor numbers are a bad thing: they still haven’t recovered their pre-pandemic crowds. The decision, dramatically announced by Emmanuel Macron, to move the Mona Lisa to a special hygienically isolated gallery where lesidiots who flock to take selfies in front of it won’t bother more cultured visitors who wish to study art in a hushed atmosphere, is a misguided act of snobbery. It may ruin the Louvre’s ecosystem as a place where high art becomes popular culture.
Continue reading…
Source link : https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jan/28/louvres-decision-to-move-mona-lisa-is-a-misguided-act-of-snobbery
Author : Jonathan Jones
Publish date : 2025-01-28 19:57:34
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
