What the Mona Lisa Tells Us About Art in the Instagram Era

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The young couple moved to the front of the crowd to look at the painting. After a few seconds, the woman turned around, smiled into her cellphone and took some selfies. Next, she handed her device to her husband, who took more formal shots of her in front of the work. The two then posed arm in arm for selfies together, turned to have a last brief look at the painting — and moved away.

“It’s too small, and it’s too crowded to get close to look at the detail,” said the woman, Jeannie Li, 28, a financial analyst in Shanghai, unimpressed by her first sight of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” “I can see it better in a book or on the internet.”

The way the couple interacted with the 500-year-old painting exemplifies how differently the digital generation experiences art. Most of the roughly 150 people crowded around the painting at the Louvre were taking photographs of the piece, or of themselves in front of it. In the presence of the “Mona Lisa,” digital photography, more than looking at the actual artwork, has become the primary experience.

Ms. Li and her husband, Steven, were in Paris for their honeymoon. Why had she wanted to visit the Louvre and see this particular artwork? “Because it’s famous, because of its mysterious smile, and because I read ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ ” Ms. Li said, referring to the best-selling novel by Dan Brown, which opens with the shooting of a curator in the museum’s Grand Gallery.

In 2017, the Louvre attracted 8.1 million visitors, retaining its long-held status as the world’s most visited museum. Leonardo’s enigmatic, infinitely reproduced portrait of a woman thought to be Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine cloth merchant, is the star attraction. Made in oil on wood in the early 16th century, the painting is presented in a temperature-controlled capsule behind bulletproof glass and a protective barrier.

“A lot of people take photos and post them on Twitter or Facebook,” Ms. Li said. “It’s evidence that ‘I’ve been there.’ ”

In October 2014, the American megastars Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and their daughter Blue Ivy, had the privilege of visiting the Louvre on their own. The resulting smartphone photo session drew huge attention on Instagram, prompting Buzzfeed to declare: “No Picture Matters More Than Beyoncé And Jay-Z Posing In Front Of The Mona Lisa,” and adding, “It might very well be the best picture of our generation. Or any generation.”

It would be easy enough for a critic or curator to dismiss the “Mona Lisa experience” as nothing more than selfie tourism. Yet Jay-Z and Beyoncé, like pretty much everyone who visits the Louvre, did actually look at the painting.

The way the “Mona Lisa” is viewed is, in fact, soberingly representative of the way most art is viewed in today’s saturated, digitally mediated, visual culture. How many more (or fewer) seconds do cellphone-wielding visitors spend looking at individual works at a commercial art fair or exhibition than at the Louvre? How is an artistic reputation made these days, other than through Instagram?

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