How to Enjoy Mona Lisa Without the Crowds
A Case for Digitised Gallery Experiences
The Louvre museum has allegedly attracted around 10.2 million visitors with “about 80% believed to come just to see the Mona Lisa”. This might sound like a triumph for the art world, as 10.2 million is a lot of French people (or basically the entire population of Sweden). But in reality, it’s actually just about 0.001308% of the global population (which is totaling 7.8 billion as of February 2021 according to the most recent United Nations estimates).
It seems like we have taken for granted the fact that only a tiny minority of people have the privilege to experience masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa. More urgently than ever before, we need to create an art world that is increasingly democratised and accessible. This means that galleries, museums and artists alike will need to embrace revolutionary advances in technology that empower worldwide accessibility.
Ironically, it would seem that even those 10.2 million people who do get to see the Mona Lisa don’t get the best experiences with the masterpiece. Here is an amusing review from a lucky tourist at the Louvre:
“Everything was perfect except the visit to the Mona Lisa,” complained Xavier on TripAdvisor. “Several floors of queues but arriving in the gallery we were frankly shocked. The staff treated visitors like cattle … Result: stress to see the painting behind glass from several metres. Scandalous!”
It seems that seeing the Mona Lisa for real wasn’t that enjoyable after all compared to what you might normally expect from visiting art galleries. Not very “zhooshy”, as a friend of mine likes to say. This casts a light on how mass consumption of mainstream art may not be exciting or in fact meaningful, especially when you queue along with an “estimated 30,000 visitors a day”.
In addition to the sub-par, in-person artwork viewing experience, the cultural benefit of seeing an “authentic” masterpiece in-person might just become obsolete when the advancements in technology from 5G to VR hit the mass market shelves in the coming years. Mona Lisa’s world famous gaze in virtual form could become just as good as the real thing. Here’s an explanation of VR by Google: “Virtual Reality (VR) can bring you anywhere — helping you learn about different places and ideas by experiencing them as if you were actually there”.
Granted, the current VR technology is yet to match our increasing demand for ultra-high media quality. From personal experience, most conversations I’ve had with artists or art-lovers always circle back to one topic: the discrepancies between seeing artwork in-person and online (in this case VR) when it comes to colour and texture. For me, colour is the most striking. Seeing artwork in-person in studios versus online can make a staggering difference since a digitized image of artworks tends to lose vibrancy and brightness. Texture has similar issues — a 2D image from a Google search could never replicate the 3D texture that makes an artwork come alive.
But just imagine what the fast-paced technological advancements might come up with in 50 years time! Considering how VR is the hottest gimmick in the tech world at the moment, we might soon get to a point where the virtual becomes just as perfect as the original.
The conflict between the idea of originality and replication has been widely debated in our culture. Walter Benjamin, a renowned Jewish-German philosopher claims:
In other words, Benjamin argues that a copy of an artwork actually has higher social significance than the original. His premise implies that allowing an artwork to be digitally replicated is in fact crucial for people in society to experience, feel and be changed by art. This seems especially relevant when considering why tourists go to famous art galleries, full of “authentic art”. Do they go there to appreciate art or is their mentality simply “I’m in Paris, so I’ll take a picture of the Mona Lisa”?
I hope that when technology can enable unlimited access to authentic-like replicas of art, this harmful tourism mindset will dissipate. Art should be more than merely a novel tourist attraction. Everyone should be able to access art, even as perfect replicas, not just a few subsections of society. These short simple words of Benjamin summarize the importance of art and the need for it’s accessibility:
“Art teaches us to see into things.”
But even after having considered these points from my own conversations and experience, I am still conflicted as to when and how VR will be able to truly replicate the colour and texture of an artwork. In time, however, I am certain that there will be perfect virtual authentic replicas. For now though we’ll just have to carry on battling those armies of tourists to get a glimpse of Mona’s smile.
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Further reading:
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/13/mona-lisa-fans-face-scandalous-queues-after-portrait-relocated
- https://www.theartnewspaper.com/analysis/extended-reality-ar-vr
- https://www.invaluable.com/blog/how-vr-is-changing-the-art-experience/
- https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction/
