* * * The Correct Epiphany
The Mona Lisa is a painting of a woman in an armchair. You know this already, obviously. You know that the woman has brown hair, and that there is a landscape behind her, a sort of yellowish melange. You know that it was painted by Leonardo da Vinci at the beginning of the 16th century, that it is located behind a pane of bulletproof glass in the Louvre Museum in Paris. You may not specifically know it’s in the Salle des États, which in the museum’s numerical system is room 711, but you do know that you can know this any time you feel like it. As paintings go, it is not obviously erotic, a fact which, combined with its sheer centrality to Western culture, has made it the basis of thousands of pastiches, each determined to shock the viewer by nudging it in that direction. For example, a recent Fantastic Man profile of Jerry Salz follows the New York art critic as he visits the artist-run space Club Rhubarb, where they encounter a diptych entitled What’s With the Smile, Mona? ‘On one side is Mona Lisa being painted, on the other are three naked men strapped to a bench in a sex club, asses red, presumably from being spanked.’ The work is by Sal Salandra, a 78-year-old former hairdresser specialising in ‘homoerotic embroidery.’
That said, a recent visit to room 711 with a friend had the same impact it always does: a blankness of mind brought on by the impossibility of saying or thinking anything much about the experience at all, and certainly nothing new or insightful. Of the responses available, I am wired to plump for the self-consciously aloof one, where I make a wry comment on the crowds and their phones. ‘Why is everyone taking pictures of an image they have seen a million times before?’ I might say. ‘They can just Google it, or buy a Mona Lisa mouse mat.’ This attempt at the ironic high ground pretends to be clever. Perhaps it includes a mention of Walter Benjamin. Really, though, it is just as stale as describing the model’s so-called enigmatic smile, and probably far more boring in its refusal to muck in, in setting itself apart.
Although I didn’t speak with the 300 or so other people who were also in the room, I suspect we all felt the hopelessness of the situation. The Mona Lisa was recently voted ‘the world’s most disappointing masterpiece.’ If during a supposedly iconic encounter with a work of art you are faced with the sensation of a prophylactic being rolled across the gland that thought emanates from, reaching for your phone is a rational act. Leaving aside curiosity as to the contents of your push alerts, it makes sense to take a photo so that you can try again later to have the correct epiphany.
A notable subcategory of the set ‘social encounters where I cannot think of even one thing to say to someone’ are those where I feel ashamed of not having more pre-existing knowledge of that person, where I have known them for years yet somehow nothing has stuck. Anything I do or say risks revealing this fact, and so I feel scared of saying anything at all. Equally, a large part of the reason for my own brain freeze is that I am embarrassed to have never actually read anything about the Mona Lisa beyond a few, admittedly interesting, passages in Jakuta Alikavazovic’s book Like a Sky Inside (2024) about a night spent sleeping in the Louvre. I don’t really have any familiarity with critical views on the painting, nor any particular grasp as to why it began to exert this kind of magnetic draw in the first place, how it became no longer an artwork but an attraction. Were the other people in room 711 also stuck between complete ignorance and the spent familiarity of a loveless marriage? Or were most of them about to go home and transform the image into a BDSM masterwork? I don’t know. I didn’t ask.
* * * A Period of Anticipation
Something these others didn’t share is the memory of a television ad I’d watched as a child, a movie trailer with a man and a woman in space suits running down a corridor pursued by an enormous stone ball. A TV channel had scheduled the film for an important slot in the post-Christmas period. Keen to maximise its viewing figures, the channel played it several times an hour during the month-long run up to the film being screened. We stayed with my grandparents that Christmas, and I told the family I wanted to have the TV on the relevant channel when the movie was on. It turned out to be dull, and I decided to do something else instead, asking my grandfather as I left the room, ‘Please could you tell me when the scene with the ball happens?’
When he called, I ran into the living room, watched the man and woman narrowly escape being crushed by the stone ball, then left again. It was the same sequence I had seen in the trailer many times very recently, but I was satisfied. Although the scene was identical to the earlier instances, it was also different. This time the film was actually on.
Also, it was the culmination of a period of anticipation. Watching it on my own terms was a useful experiment with respect to the cycle of desire and fulfilment that decides, in the end, how a person acts and feels. I am always waiting for various events and encounters to come to fruition, but rarely are those events as specific or predictable as that movie scene, or the Mona Lisa.
* * * The Secret Things We Might Do in Beds
In February of 2012, Jeanette Winterson, esteemed author of books such as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011), was looking out from a hotel room in London when she saw a couple having sex. It was a little after four in the morning and they were in a fenced-off area, a building site, basically. ‘He pulls her over the stacked metal towards the thrown piles of timber,’ Winterson wrote. ‘He is undoing his trousers. She hasn’t unbuttoned her coat.’
She records this scene in an essay called ‘A Place Before the Flood,’ a title that references how the hotel, which is not there anymore, was shaped like a boat.
It also had exactly one bedroom. Every month a different writer would stay in the hotel. At other times it would also welcome an artist, a musician and around 20 paying members of the public. I spent time in the hotel though never in the bed. My part-time day job during that period was to edit the website of the arts organisation – Artangel – which invited Winterson and others to become guests in the hotel, to create new work while in residence there. I was living in Clerkenwell, in a shared flat a ten-minute walk from the office, and I was keenly interested in the possibilities offered by the creation of site-specific art, where the sense of where the work ended and the real world began was often blurred at the edges. It showed me that art is most powerful when it flirts with being something other than art. The hotel’s shape was inspired by the Roi des Belges, a steam-boat that Joseph Conrad had commandeered on a voyage along the Congo before writing Heart of Darkness (1899), the controversial novel that is a constant motif in the work of the artist Fiona Banner, who devised the project with the architect David Kohn.
It is actually quite rare, I would think, to have possession of the names of the people who have slept in the same bed as you, at least if those people aren’t your family or friends. The secret things we might do in beds, did the other guests do those things too? It suggested a vicarious form of intimacy, with people you might never meet in person … In other hotels we know that thousands of other people have slept in the same bed as us, but the anonymity keeps them at arm’s length.
The month after Winterson saw the sex downstairs, it was the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist’s turn to stay. He wrote about the Tang dynasty painter Wu Tao-tzu, who, according to the traditional lore, clapped his hands one day and stepped into one of his pictures, never to be seen again. ‘When I first heard this tale as a child, entering a picture seemed a very natural thing to do,’ wrote Lindqvist. ‘What else could you do? Not to enter would have been to miss a golden opportunity.’ The pictures that excited him most in the grey Sweden of the 1930s were those found on tins of food, like sardines or pineapples. ‘Opening the tin was opening the picture. Smelling the contents brought me to the brink of the picture world. Eating was entering.’
This artist-made hotel, sitting so prominently on the London riverside, had also offered Lindqvist a way of clapping one’s hands and entering something that was, like the Mona Lisa, an artwork and a tourist attraction at the same time. And this time he could actually sleep there. Several months later, the Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle took this concept further still, spending a night there with another artwork, one that had been inspired by the boat-hotel, namely Allo! (2012) by the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans: ‘I glance at the painting from under the duvet, the boat creaking and groaning in the wind. I give it a sideways look at 4 a.m. I peer at it balefully at dawn and over breakfast. How long can you really look at a painting?’
Then, a lot more recently, we have Jakuta Alikavazovic, asleep in the Salle des Cariatides near the Venus de Milo. She’s composing a book for the French publisher Editions Stock, part of a series in which the writers spend a night in the museum of their choice. Her relationship with the Louvre has its own texture, its own form of intimacy. Her father ‘came to Paris in 1971, for the love of my poetess mother,’ she wrote. ‘He stayed for the Louvre.’ Each time he took Alikavazovic there, he’d ask: ‘And you, how would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa?’
* * * Embrace Rather Than Resent
The most disappointing masterpiece. It’s unfair. The Mona Lisa is a beautiful painting. It’s possible that I think about it, or come close to thinking about it, every day. The survey from which this verdict was supposedly gathered was carried out by Couponbirds, a website specialising in free coupons and deals.
It’s not disappointing, I think, if you embrace rather than resent the crowds that surround the painting, as an interesting spectacle of fulfilled anticipation. If only someone would launch a dating app that is exclusively usable in room 711 they would tap into a lucrative dynamo of erotic energy, a yearning for this encounter to mean something, to be climactic rather than anticlimactic. Not only that, but you could then walk around the rest of the Louvre together with your newfound date, and find those rooms that, even at peak time, sit empty due to their relative lack of fame, which is largely thanks to their not having been stolen in 1911 by Vincenzo Peruggia.
I learned about Peruggia, an Italian museum worker who worked at the Louvre, from Alikavazovic’s book, my prime and really only source of knowledge about what is nonetheless the one painting whose name I would blurt out if you held a gun to my head and shouted: ‘Name a painting!’ I read it because sleeping with artworks is an interesting idea. Of course, she is sleeping with them at their place, whereas Peruggia takes them home to his. ‘How do you sleep, how do you dream, with the world’s most famous portrait slipped beneath your bed frame?’ Alikavazovic writes. ‘Well? Poorly? Or not at all?’ Or do you get out of bed, turn on the light, and try to have a climactic epiphany?