Although I don't like the tone of the article, it does have a point.
Whether or not most of the Louvre visitors are there only for Mona Lisa, most will want to at least see it, whereas the rest of the museum is diverse enough to never be too crowded.
Moving that painting elsewhere would probably make it an immensely better experience for visitors who aren't coming for it. The entrance queues would not be that long, and past these queues, as long as you avoid that room the museum is more than large enough not to be crowded.
So let those who want to see the painting see it, and let those who want to the see the rest of the museum see it. People can do both of course, but there's no need to ask people who just want to see Mona Lisa to navigate the museum.
I'm surprised the Louvre hasn't done just that. Currently the Mona Lisa is pretty much in the middle of a section devoted to French and Italian paintings. Which makes sense, but doesn't work well in practice. The Mona Lisa crowds can get so big it's hard to even get a look at the other painting in the same room.
Move it to a separate room, install turnstiles that limit the amount of people in the room to something reasonable, and it will be a better experience for everyone. Even the people who are only there to take a picture of the Mona Lisa will be able to do it faster.
Many other museums seem better at limiting the amount of people near some attraction. To see Da Vinci's next most famous work, The Last Supper, you purchase a ticket that corresponds to a 15-minute slot. The Bust of Nefertiti, one of the most famous antique items, is kept in a separate room of the Neues Museum, with the staff not letting people in if it gets too crowded.
This sounds like a very sensible idea. Why not move it to its own area where the tourist crowds can have their selfies and, if they're done at that point, go do something else without clogging things up for the rest of the visitors?
From what little I've been exposed to about art management, it's also not great for the works in general to have crowds around them - aside from obvious things like people touching them, it puts an extra burden on the climate control system.
> it puts an extra burden on the climate control system
The Louvre doesn't have climate control throughout the compound. There's some sections that have it. But during August one should expect their visit to be fairly sweltering.
They could do what the UK does with the crown jewels and literally install a conveyor belt system that makes it nearly impossible to stand there for long periods of time.
Another option is to charge a dynamic fee to see the painting based on crowd size.
La Joconde has been at the Louvre since 1797. Since 1878, it has been displayed in the Salle des États - a room originally used by Napoleon III for legislative sessions. As you mention, the room hosts many Venetian works, and has been recently renovated to complement the paintings it showcases. For instance, the walls were painted a deep Prussian blue to contrast with the golden frames and highlight the vivid pigments typical of these works.
This legacy and continuity matter to the curators and art historians who maintain the museum.
As part of the renovations, the flow of the room was redesigned to accommodate for the fact that visitors spend more time in front of the Joconde (curators mention that a visitor spends on average 50 seconds looking at La Joconde, versus 4 seconds for other paintings).
I was at the Louvre for the first time just a couple weeks ago. The Mona Lisa room was so crowded that I didn't bother lining up or looking at anything else in the room. Definitely a bad experience for people who don't like crowded museums.
I'm not that familiar with museum design or their funding mechanisms, but for logistical purposes, sometimes if you want a lot of foot traffic in your building, you make people navigate around to see the "crown jewels" so-to-speak which forces/exposes them to other items of interest you want to "sell" (taxpayers, government, private market...).
If you need to count beans for some government funding agency to justify your budget, this is a way to inflate bean count and prop up underperforming aspects. As long as it's a situation that isn't incredibly wasteful and done in good taste, I support it--though this is of course highly subjective.
If you break that number up so it's easier to see why people visit (e.g., separating the Mona Lisa), it may inadvertantly give justification to cut funding to the other aspects in many modern mindsets. Mixing the artworks up artificially inflates other works foot traffic that, I would argue, is a positive form of trickery for society (preservation and education of the arts, something important and often underfunded).
Museums that attract a lot of tourists are geared towards moving people in and out as fast as possible. The longer they are in the house the fewer tickets you can sell.
Milk is in the back because they have to maintain the cold chain, and the refrigeration is in the back. Putting it anywhere else risks spoilage if a pallet takes too long to unload or gets left unattended.
There's definitely a lot of dripping condescension in that piece. That said, yeah, I think it's substantially correct. If the Mona Lisa is going to attract such outsized crowds--and, in my experience, they are outsized compared to a work of art in any other museum I've been to--you'd do both the art and the crowds a favor by separating it and putting it in an environment to optimize viewing and provide context/educational background.
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam did just that. There is a 'tourist path' where all the must-see famous works are shown, predictably, everybody goes by in single file so they can put a checkmark on their instagram account or whatever they use to show they've 'been there'. And then there is a huge collection of lesser known but worthwhile works in the rest of the museum. And - unfortunately - vaults full of art that likely will not see the light of day for a very long time because of lack of exposition space.
> And - unfortunately - vaults full of art that likely will not see the light of day for a very long time because of lack of exposition space.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna currently has an exhibition on called Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and other Treasures, by Wes Anderson and Juman Malouf. Neither of them are museum professionals, so their choices of which objects to display and how to arrange them differ quite notably from what one might normally see in the museum, even though they're drawn from the same collection. I found it a very interesting and enjoying experience.
Ironically, this would be elevating the status of the Mona Lisa by giving its own museum. Sometimes you have to do nonsensical things to achieve logical goals.
Whether or not most of the Louvre visitors are there only for Mona Lisa, most will want to at least see it, whereas the rest of the museum is diverse enough to never be too crowded.
Moving that painting elsewhere would probably make it an immensely better experience for visitors who aren't coming for it. The entrance queues would not be that long, and past these queues, as long as you avoid that room the museum is more than large enough not to be crowded.
So let those who want to see the painting see it, and let those who want to the see the rest of the museum see it. People can do both of course, but there's no need to ask people who just want to see Mona Lisa to navigate the museum.