Why would anyone bother seeing the Mona Lisa? How protesters spoiled museums
Like bindweed blighting a beautiful garden, queues trail across the Cour Napoléon as I arrive at the Musée du Louvre on a weekday lunchtime. When an attendant informs me that, without a pre-booked ticket, it could take two hours even to reach the middle of the courtyard and the glass-and-metal pyramid (the museum’s principal entrance) from which the queues sprout, any hope for a speedy, in-and-out visit disappears. Sacré bleu! There are nearly half a million objects in the Louvre’s collections, but today I only want to see one. Trouble is, it happens to be the world’s most famous painting, and thousands of others are clamouring to see it, too.
Earlier this year, the Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, acknowledged the ‘public disappointment’ that visiting Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic half-length portrait of a Florentine noblewoman, known as the Mona Lisa, can elicit. ‘We feel we’re not doing our job properly,’ she reportedly told staff, while floating the idea that, as part of a €500 million redevelopment, it could be moved underground to accommodate the crowds – who, in recent years, have included the occasional protester, such as the environmental activists who threw pumpkin soup at the painting in January, or the fellow disguised as an elderly woman in a wheelchair who, in 2022, smeared cream across its protective glass. Are things really that bad? Spoiler alert: they’re worse.
After shuffling through a full-body scanner and having my bag X-rayed, as if passing through airport security, I file into the museum’s subterranean foyer, a soulless shopping mall overheated by that greenhouse-like structure above, to begin the long trudge to the Salle des Etats, one of the largest rooms in this former royal palace. Here, like some withered mummy preserved in a sarcophagus, the Mona Lisa is entombed in climatically stable conditions inside a bespoke display case, fitted with bulletproof glass and set, with sombre pomp, on a colossal wall painted midnight blue.
Even last year, when numbers were still recovering after the pandemic, the Louvre attracted almost nine million visitors; and that’s with a cap of 30,000 tickets per day to guarantee, according to an official release, ‘an optimal experience’. Yet, most visitors, many of whom have never been to the Louvre before, head straight for the Denon Wing, where a large number of its best-known artworks, including Leonardo’s masterpiece, may be found – causing an almighty logjam. Moreover, in their mania for a selfie with La Joconde (as Leonardo’s painting is known in France), these day-trippers in baseball caps and rucksacks seem oblivious to the astonishing art they might pass en route. A massive marble head of the Roman emperor Hadrian’s deified young lover Antinous? Whatever! A delicate fresco depicting Venus and the Three Graces by Sandro Botticelli? Who cares? Along the way, tiny reproductions of the Mona Lisa beside arrows appear on signage, but they’re not easy to spot, resulting in an enervating art-historical round of Where’s Wally?.
In the Grande Galerie, which contains Italian paintings that most museum directors would kill for, barely anyone lingers before several other pictures by Leonardo – including La Belle Ferronnière, a portrait of a lady-in-waiting who appears narked at the best of times, but whose nose, today, seems properly out of joint. I don’t blame her. While she has no suitors whatsoever, her rival around the corner is attended by a chaotic horde, like a superstar above a mosh pit. Kettled by large black screens, as well as a dozen guards, this jostling, irritable mass of people inches forwards without respite, already holding aloft smartphones (along with the odd child, one wearing a Kylian Mbappé football shirt, resting on a parent’s shoulders). After 30 or so seconds at the front of the scrum, yet still behind retractable barriers positioned several feet away (so that it’s impossible to study the painting in any detail), I’m ushered along by supervisors hollering, ‘Avancez, s’il vous plaît! Avancez!’
It is, by any measure, a deranged, abysmal way to encounter art; if anything, the conclusion of a recent report – that the Mona Lisa is considered ‘the world’s most disappointing masterpiece’ – doesn’t go far enough. As for engaging with the surrounding masterpieces, by the likes of Titian and Veronese: forget it. Most tourists to whom I speak afterwards seem bemused: ‘I’m glad I got a picture with it,’ shrugs a subdued 30-something teacher from Baltimore, ‘but I don’t get the appeal, or understand why it’s more famous than any of these other paintings.’ Some are even alarmed by the hurly-burly: ‘It’s very intimidating,’ a Californian woman tells me.
To make matters worse, super-rich celebrities seemingly play by different rules. Recently, to titillate her 292 million followers on Instagram, Kendall Jenner, the American model and reality star, posted a picture of herself – posing, peculiarly, barefoot – up close and personal with the Mona Lisa, captioned, ‘The Louvre at midnight.’ Just Kendall and Lisa, and not another soul in sight: how much did that photo opportunity cost?
(A spokesperson for the Louvre confirms that Jenner ‘paid’ for a ‘private evening visit’, but says the amount ‘will not be disclosed’.) ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits,’ the 19th-century art critic Walter Pater once rhapsodised about the Mona Lisa. ‘Like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.’ How prescient his fanciful words have proved. Today, the Salle des Etats is the centre of museum hell.
The Mona Lisa may be an extreme case. Still, it crystallises an issue increasingly faced by the world’s most prominent museums and galleries: how to ameliorate the experience of visiting places that have become attractions as much as settings for contemplating art, to be ticked off swiftly by tourists rattling through a trip, while simultaneously protecting the cherished objects under their care. Many museum-goers will have dismaying memories of fighting through thronged ‘blockbusters’ while dodging sharp elbows, or traipsing across endless galleries, hustled by glazed-eyed sightseers, in a hopeless, completist bid to see some renowned collection abroad (as if standing for a few seconds in front of a painting or sculpture, before plodding on, counted as engaging with art in any meaningful sense).
‘It can be hard to concentrate because everybody’s moving at speed,’ says the art historian, former National Gallery director and author of The Art Museum in Modern Times Charles Saumarez Smith. ‘Personally, I found going to the National Gallery during Covid incredibly enjoyable because it was a calmer environment. You didn’t have this pressure of large numbers of people.’ Yet the pandemic also precipitated the introduction of time-consuming, wait-in-line protocols – and, today, as museums are targeted by activist groups, blockages are commonplace.
‘The ultimate experience is to walk off the street and be with the art within two to five minutes, and not have to queue or be hassled,’ says Xavier Bray, the director of the Wallace Collection, a national museum to the north of London’s Oxford Street with its own crowd-magnet masterpieces, including The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals. Bray recalls when it was still possible to nip into the National Gallery via an overlooked entrance around the back and – ‘Boom!’ – you were face to face with a painting by Rubens. But, he continues, ‘in the big museums, that’s been lost. The uptight types who love being super-organised have won a very big battle against those who are more just “let it be”.’
Today’s museum administrators, admittedly, are under pressure to justify grants by demonstrating ever higher visitor numbers and more diverse audiences; it is a shibboleth that publicly funded museums should be public-facing. Yet the ‘trouble’ with obsessing about numbers, suggests Saumarez Smith, ‘is that it produces an endless drive up and, at some point, the quality of being able to concentrate and enjoy a collection is reduced’.
Moreover, attitudes regarding the public were rather different during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when lots of museums were erected. A high-minded belief that they were principally for connoisseurs and collectors still prevailed in the mid-1930s when art historian Eric Maclagan, the Oxford-educated son of an Archbishop of York who ran the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) for more than 20 years, delivered a speech to the Museums Association in which he described the public as ‘a noun of three letters beginning with A and ending with S’. Even in the 1980s, when Saumarez Smith worked at the V&A, it remained, he says, in thrall to ‘the traditional idea of a museum as a repository of objects’, to be studied by scholars most interested in their peers. He recalls someone senior at the museum commenting on a junior colleague’s new-fangled ‘interest in the public’: ‘That wasn’t what was expected. It was regarded as mildly eccentric.’
No museum leader would now express, or perhaps even think, something so heretical; over the past half-century, there has been a shift to democratise and let the public in. ‘What changed under [Margaret] Thatcher,’ explains Saumarez Smith, ‘was the idea that public funding had duties and responsibilities attached to it, and if you got public money, it had to be for public benefit.’ Tate Modern, which opened in 2000, was emblematic of this transition: that gentle ramp at its western end, leading down into the Turbine Hall, was a deliberately popularising touch designed to encourage access; an architectural riposte to the grand staircases beneath intimidating porticos that define so many neoclassical museum façades, intended to overawe and elevate, elsewhere. Whereas museums were once seemingly impregnable citadels of high culture, these days they are routinely compared to parks and public forums – a notion underscored recently, on the morning after the general election, when Keir Starmer chose the Turbine Hall as the setting for his victory speech. Evidently, it resonates with the public, too: last year, Tate Modern was visited by 4.75 million people.
Yet, despite such liberalising aims, many museums – reluctantly – are becoming citadels again. Recent demonstrations orchestrated inside museums and galleries by environmental, animal-rights and pro-Palestinian activists – including, this spring, a couple of octogenarian climate protesters (one a clergywoman in a dog collar) who took a hammer and chisel to the case protecting a copy of Magna Carta at the British Library – have forced them to tighten security and, as it were, reinstate, rather than remove, the barricades. For the New York-based museum strategist and author András Szántó, ‘anything that erects any kind of barrier’ is a problem. ‘It’s a very painful legacy of our times,’ he tells me. ‘Just as the airport experience has got worse, the museum has got worse.’
Ironically, by redefining and expanding their civic role, museums may even have set themselves up as targets. ‘There is something noteworthy about the fact that people have brought their protest to the museum,’ Szántó explains. ‘They didn’t bring it to the mall, they didn’t bring it to a cinema, or, say, an LVMH store, although maybe that might have been more appropriate. They brought it to the museum. And that signals that, for the vast majority of people, the museum is that civic site identified as a sort of public square, as the Speakers’ Corner of society. That’s not to say that this hasn’t been an enormously challenging moment for museums. But it has also underscored the idea that the museum is one of the institutions we can point to where the public shares its grievances or points of view.’
If, though, the contemporary museum is now a ‘public square’, how can institutions meet this ‘challenging moment’ without further deteriorating what Szántó calls the ‘visitor experience’? For Anthony Amore, the director of security at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, ‘The unique challenge of securing a museum – as opposed to, say, a bank or a jewellery store – is that the whole point is accessibility.’ At the same time, he tells me, ‘The violence of attacks is stepping up: the trend is worrisome.’ Earlier this year, a pro-Palestinian activist sprayed red paint on to a 1914 portrait by Philip de László of the British politician Lord Balfour at Trinity College, Cambridge, before slashing it with a blade. An additional tension is that while most museum leaders, including many older trustees, are opposed on principle to attacking art, some, often younger, members of staff sympathise with the activists.
To those who defend the protests by suggesting that long-term damage has mostly been avoided (the art historian John-Paul Stonard has described Just Stop Oil’s efforts as ‘one of the most successful campaigns of civil disobedience in history’), Amore says: ‘It’s wrong-headed and disturbing. [The protesters] are feigning that they understand what will and will not damage a piece of art. But it’s absurd to think that you’re not putting the item at risk. We’re seeing them glue themselves to frames, disregarding the fact that frames are art themselves. They’re not experts in the conservation or care of art. That’s hubris. It’s folly to believe they can make that judgment call on their own.’
According to Bray, who says that ‘it’s become very, very difficult to oversee a museum’, ensuring a collection’s safety is still ‘the ultimate priority’. Yet security measures can be expensive and unwelcome: do we want longer queues at entrances, or beefy guards stationed everywhere like bouncers at a nightclub? Besides, many sensible measures are already in place, which haven’t deterred activists. The National Gallery, which carries out bag searches and asks visitors to pass through airport-style body-scanners upon entry, has been targeted three times in recent years by Just Stop Oil protesters: they’ve pasted an image on to The Hay Wain by John Constable, before glueing themselves to its frame; chucked tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers; and smashed the glass over The Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez with safety hammers, hidden within clothing – 109 years after suffragette Mary Richardson attacked the same painting with a meat cleaver. Constable’s landscape, which wasn’t glazed, suffered minor damage, but so did The Rokeby Venus, which was protected behind two layers of glass.
For Bray, there’s another downside to glazing, besides cost and efficacy: ‘Some pictures, mainly those that are highly finished, react well to it,’ he explains. ‘But with anything that’s painterly – Titian, Velázquez, and so on – the magic’s gone, simple as that. For the true aesthete, you want that interaction with the brushwork… I find it very upsetting to see everything glazed, everything cordoned off.’ From a security perspective, he tells me, the ‘ideal’ would be that ‘nobody comes in with anything’ – which museums could achieve by setting up ‘a whole system outside’ with banks of ‘super-lockers’. (Already the British Museum performs security checks in ugly white tents before the entrances.) CCTV, obviously, is essential but, Bray suggests, artificial intelligence and ‘image-recognising techniques’ could also be employed to identify activists – although, he adds immediately, ‘it’s an awful thing to do and would have to be a Government decision’. Otherwise, he continues, ‘you go back to basics, and teach people to nurture these great objects’. Ultimately, there must be an ‘element of trust’: ‘There’s a system in place, but then you need to trust your audience.’
‘It’s a risk you take,’ agrees Frances Morris, Tate Modern’s director from 2016 until last year. ‘You have wonderfully trained staff, good infrastructure, but you have to trust your public. If you don’t, how can you have a conversation with them?’ At Tate Modern, Morris took the, as she puts it, ‘radical step’ of sanctioning activism within the museum. ‘We agreed that, in principle, unless activists were breaking the law, or impacting significantly on the public’s experience, they would be welcome. I was blessed for seven years to be at the receiving end of some amazing activism in and around the building that did not cause the public or members of staff distress.’
She believes that by being ‘open and welcome’ as an institution, and having a ‘conversation’, ‘you are probably de-risking the likelihood’ of vandalism. Dewy-eyed? Perhaps. But this emphasis on trust and openness is significant and may indicate how museums could evolve during the next 50 years. According to Szántó, who, in the pandemic, invited dozens of museum leaders to contribute to his book The Future of the Museum, ‘certain museums already point to the future’, such as Rotterdam’s Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the world’s first publicly accessible art depot (which opened in 2021), and V&A East Storehouse, due to open in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park next year.
Recently, the V&A’s deputy director, Tim Reeve, gave me a tour of its cavernous, purpose-built home, inside the former London 2012 Olympics media centre. (Imagine a warehouse with crates, cherry pickers, and silver ducts, as you’d expect, but also serried extraordinary objects – Chinese ceramics, an elaborate Italian chest, poisoned arrows, a whalebone walking stick – filling endless metal shelves.) For the first time, Reeve explains, the V&A’s ‘entire reserve collection’, encompassing hundreds of thousands of objects hitherto hidden away within West Kensington’s Blythe House, will be presented in an ‘operational museum storage facility’ (ie, a secure, climate-controlled depot, with conservation studios, study rooms, and so on) that is, simultaneously, a ‘self-guided museum experience’, with various curated displays, open to the public. ‘We’re not going to be playing fast and loose with the security of our collections,’ says Reeve, who hopes to ‘push the envelope in terms of radical access to national collections’ and reveal ‘the magic of museology’.
‘By completely opening up their collections,’ explains Szántó, museums are ‘giving much more agency to the viewer to define what their experience interacting with art could be’. Increasingly, he argues, this idea of ‘agency’ will be key: ‘I can imagine a future where you might ask a museum you’re going to visit a week from now, for your birthday, to put together an exhibition for you and your guests in a room. It sounds fantastically complicated, but maybe it’s doable.’ Moreover, in the virtual realm, he suggests, there will be an opportunity for ‘endless customisation’, as well as ‘the amalgamation of the museum into sort of super-museums’: ‘If and when we develop high-quality, satisfying viewing experiences in the metaverse – and maybe Apple’s [new Vision Pro] headset is pointing us a little bit in this direction – there is no reason only to go to one museum in that virtual space. I can imagine a future where we can go to something like a souk: a village of museums in virtual space, where you go down this street and you’re in the Hermitage [in Saint Petersburg], or that street and you’re in the Tate.’
In general, he suggests, the tendency will be to ‘disintermediate the museum experience’, so that museum-goers will be able to define the ‘visitor experience’ for themselves. Some museums are already approaching the interpretation of objects differently. The Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Tasmania, for instance, has done away with traditional labels altogether in favour of ‘The O’, a downloadable app that prioritises ‘a different type of storytelling’, with multiple layers of audio interpretation.
Morris agrees that ‘the direction of travel is more collaboration, more transparency’. She smiles. ‘For me, it’s very exciting that everything will be thrown into the air, because everything is continuously thrown into the air, it’s just that people outside museums don’t see the juggling. But it’s all happening. The ecology will shift, definitely.’ Let’s hope that, as part of this evolution, museums will ease those off-putting crowds.