Hey, Mona!

Very well said.

From the Guardian Onart blog by Jonathon Jones:

Dumbing down the Louvre? Blame Mona Lisa

Too posh for Picasso? ... Visitors look at paintings by Picasso and Delacroix (top) at the Louvre. Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters

It's a measure of the cultural distance between Paris and London that French critics of the Louvre consider a Picasso exhibition a grotesque exercise in populist crowd-pleasing. The exhibition in question, Picasso and the Masters, has just opened at the Grand Palais with additional sections at the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay; according to reports in today's papers the Society of Friends of the Louvre see its involvement as yet another instance of desperately chasing visitor numbers.

Marc Fumaroli, the Society's chairman, said the crowds of visitors the Louvre gets are a "cancer" and it should not be encouraging them. The National Gallery recently announced it too will show the Picasso exhibition after it closes in Paris early next year. No one in London batted an eyelid, distracted as reports were by its plans to show a walk-in tableau of Amsterdam's red light district.

In other words, while London chases the newer than new, Paris, where the new was invented, still has a cultural elite confident enough to frown on today's art-hungry masses. Or does it? Perhaps it just has a bunch of snotty frauds, sniffing at their perceived inferiors when they could be learning and contemplating. Because if anyone really is disconcerted by Picasso, they expose themselves as fools. No artist is more serious, more intelligent, more worthwhile - no artist offers a better bridge between new and old, shocking and serious. The whole point of Picasso and the Masters is to reveal this great artist's profound appetite for art's history even as he shattered and remade that history.

Picasso's respect for high art makes him, by today's despicable standards, an elitist. Yet his art has so much kick and punch and visceral life that you could be satisfied with this one man alone and never look at another artist. Far from crowd-pleasing for its own sake, Picasso and the Masters is a vindication of serious cultural values for our time. I can't wait to see it.

If these Paris snobs really are criticising Picasso, I have no time for them. Anyway, they are missing the point, aren't they? The Louvre really does have a problem with the way its visitors relate to its collections - but the culprit is not Picasso. It's not a modernist at all. The dumbing down of the Louvre is all the fault of Leonardo da Vinci.

It's the Mona Lisa and her alone that a very high proportion of visitors come to the Louvre: the museum is failing totally to deal with the consequences of that. The Mona Lisa is displayed among 16th-century Venetian masterpieces that include Titian's Concert Champetre and Veronese's Marriage at Cana - but no one looks at them and you feel eccentric for doing so.

In their haste to find the Mona Lisa, the crowds even walk past Michelangelo's Slaves without stopping. I suppose a neon sign flashing MICHELANGELO might at least make them slow down. Other parts of the museum are often empty: you can have Van Eyck's Madonna of Chancellor Rolin or Watteau's Gilles to yourself. The museum needs to put the Mona Lisa in a separate section, and charge separately to see it. That one change would solve all the problems that worry Monsieur Fumaroli.