What do we need masterpiesces for?

IBARLUCÍA, RICARDO

Otro; l Coloquio Internacional "Life Configurations"; 2012

UNSAM-Universidad de Dresde

From the French Revolution, when the Louvre was transformed into a state-run museum, Leonardo?s painting receives the looks from most of the visitors. Millions and millions of men, women and children from the most distant corners of the world have gone to Paris to see it. Countless books about it have been published, from the essays of Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater, up to an extent of reasons for its fame, going through novels which recreate the circumstances of its robbery in 1912. Artist like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Wahrhol, among others, have parodied it until turning it into a pop icon. Films and TV series about its story have been shot, tons of postcards, posters, diaries, t-shirts, tea sets and key rings with the face of the Gioconda have been manufactured and her name has been useful in order to baptize restaurants, hotels, bars, perfumeries and even a candy brands. An easy way to get rid of this problem is to say that Mona Lisa has become a cliché, a commonplace for the cultural industry, a consumer object, whose widespread acceptance has nothing to do with the world of art or the superior evaluations which constitute the aesthetical experience, but also with other things such as mass culture, kitsch or tourism. It is more difficult to try to find out why a masterpiece, consecrated according to the criteria of any time, can still be enjoying respect and producing fascination several centuries afterwards, beyond changes in taste, artistic tendencies and subjective judgments. What is the factor which causes that certain masterpieces stand out with a power of evocation that not only lasts, but is also updated from one generation to another, from one period to the other?