The Sad Mona Project is a series of sad clown faces applied to well known portraits through the ages. They were posted on Instagram in early 2024 over the course of 100+ days, one per da.
This project is also a Substack “newsletter” (launching soon) to which you can subscribe to receive one Sad Mona portrait every week directly to your email inbox for 100+ weeks. Please visit the substack for details and to subscribe. https://sadmona.substack.com
On January 28, 2024 an activist group called Riposte Alimentaire staged an action in the Louvre museum in Paris, throwing pumpkin soup at the Mona Lisa. The perpetrators then made a statement about issue of food insecurity, calling
for a universal allowance for food in France. Here is a brief report on the BBC. Here is the website of the group. Click on the photo to see a 14 sec. clip.
My immediate reaction was one of sadness. How sad to see a painting that is so revered by so many people now disrespected. And poor Leonardo, imagine how mystifying the modern world would seem to him! Or Mona, imagine how she might feel.
I am at best ambivalent about famous art. Quite apart from the tricky business of how art is collected and comes to be coveted, once art attains the status of icon, it becomes more and more difficult to justify the prestige it enjoys. Mass attention (admission fees, long line ups, crowds, clicking cameras, protective shields and barriers) contradicts almost everything that we value about the work itself (the intimacy of the relationship between artist and subject, the subject’s patience, the artist’s talent and diligence, the patron/collector’s devotion, the museum’s care). You might say the work is drowning in the soup of irony.
Mona has suffered her share of trials and tribulations. She was kidnapped in 1911 (and returned two years later) and attacked on two separate occasions in 1956. One vandal threw acid, the other a rock. – Carnegie Museums of Pittsburg
The last such public ‘defacing’ protest I recall involved mashed potatoes and a Monet painting in Potsdam, Germany. I wrote about that here.
Below is a sample of the first 12 Sad Mona posts. The whole series is posted on Instagram @sketch_finish.
There’s more to be said about sadness and clowns and art, but that will have to wait for another day.
Thanks for your interest. Please look up the posts on Instagram and consider subscribing to the Substack.
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