The Mona Lisa Kind of Sucks

The essay I should have written in art school

I was talking with a friend who recently went to Paris, and while she was there, she went to see the Mona Lisa. The experience as she described it was pretty close to when I went to see Edward Munch’s The Scream when it was exhibited in Tokyo.

There’s a long line up, and people have to shuffle around at a pace that gives everyone the same few moments to look at it. So it’s not an environment that gives you a chance to really be present with the art.

“Of course,” she said, “it’s still a great painting.”

Is it? To me the Mona Lisa is completely uninspiring. It’s just a murky brown Renaissance era passport photo.

I have respect for Leonardo DaVinci as an artist. I studied his silver point work at art school for some project in some class that I don’t remember, and his sense of form and atmosphere in the negative space between figures really impressed me.

But does that make him so much better than so many other artists before or since? I can name a half dozen comic artists off the top of my head who routinely create figures with energy and dynamism that have an expressiveness that speaks to me far more than faded ideals of form in sepia tones. It’s not just that these artists are of my time and part…