My Mona Lisa Selfie, And The Modern Museum As Glorified Mall

-Analysis-

PARIS — The planned isolation of the Mona Lisa, announced by French President Emmanuel Macron earlier this year as part of the Louvre’s “New Renaissance” plan, continues to make waves. Presented as a solution to overcrowding, the move actually reveals a more profound transformation: museums — once a temple of contemplation — are gradually morphing into a staged environment, tailored to meet the demands of spectacle and social media.

The idea of creating a separate route just for this painting is only one symptom of a broader managerial approach to culture, where the museum experience is reduced to mere crowd control. Visitors are managed, not guided. Even the language used reflects this shift — efficiency now takes precedence over aesthetic experience. But what remains of a museum when it is sliced into autonomous modules, as if every painting required its own territory?

Removing the Mona Lisa from the presence of neighboring works by Veronese or Titian undermines the very essence of the space. Authentic emotion is often sparked not by the expected, but by the unexpected — a chance detour, an unplanned encounter. Without this, the world’s most-visited museum is at risk of becoming, in Marc Fumaroli’s biting phrase from L’État culturel, a “cultural supermarket” — a place not for discovery, but for consumption, to the loss of any meaningful encounter with art.

Viral masterpieces

Make no mistake — this shift reflects a broader, more troubling evolution in our relationship to art, now subject to the demands of what might be called the “selfie civilization.” A painting’s value is no longer measured by its symbolic power or aesthetic depth, but by its ability to generate viral content. Influencers have become the new cultural tastemakers, turning museum halls into backdrops for their digital performances.

Must the museum really imitate the model of a mall, its galleries reduced to customer routes?

This isn’t just a harmless event — it heralds a kind of soft barbarism, one that, under the guise of democratization, drains art of its meaning. The lady with the enigmatic smile is no longer contemplated for her own sake, but enlisted into the personal storytelling of the digital self. Visiting the Mona Lisa becomes a backdrop for selfies, as if the painting’s only value lay in its ability to serve as a backdrop for our connected narcissism.

It’s no longer about seeing the world’s most famous smile — it’s about seeing ourselves in front of it. The painting becomes set decoration, the gallery a photo studio, and aesthetic experience just another form of social validation. Cultural marketing prevails in the name of so-called optimization, which is nothing more than a surrender to the zeitgeist. After surviving the storms of history, escaping fires and revolutions… the Mona Lisa ends up as little more than Instagram filler.

Tourism emoji

Supporters of this plan will no doubt argue that museums must adapt to new behaviors. There’s truth in that. But isn’t there something pathologically defeatist about surrendering to the logic of entertainment? Must the museum really imitate the model of a mall, its galleries reduced to customer routes? And even more pressing — should this adaptation come at the cost of isolating the artwork from the cultural context that gives it meaning?

There’s a strange paradox at play here: in the name of accessibility, the result is a two-tiered system. On one side, the Mona Lisa as a “loss leader” — a tourism emoji of sorts. On the other, the “deep museum,” filled with lesser-known yet equally precious treasures, now left to a dwindling few. The once-universal museum morphs into a device of cultural segregation.

Where the museum once encouraged quiet reflection, it now delivers a packaged, clocked, and social media-friendly experience.

The Louvre’s administrators would do well to remember that true accessibility doesn’t mean lowering art to the supposed level of the public — it means giving everyone the means to rise to it. By giving in to this logic, they betray the very ideal they claim to uphold. Cultural democratization, under the pretext of adapting to “public expectations,” ultimately abandons its civilizing mission.

Where the museum once encouraged quiet reflection and worthwhile wandering through the centuries, it now delivers a packaged, clocked, and social media-friendly experience. It’s the triumph of culture as entertainment, where the goal is no longer to understand or feel, but to take part in a scripted social ritual. And what will remain once every artwork is placed under glass? Likely a patchwork of attractions placed side by side — with art stripped of its power to surprise.

What is a museum, if not a space where the unexpected can still emerge? Where art confronts us with the otherness of different times and sensibilities? Where a visitor, intent on seeing the Mona Lisa, ends up captivated by a Vermeer they’d never heard of, or moved by an Italian primitive they didn’t know existed? That happy accident — the chance encounter with something unforeseen — is exactly what’s now being sacrificed on the altar of tourism efficiency.