Mona Lisa is the only beauty who went through history and retained her reputation.
What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, "Where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs?" They are like me; through the years, we've seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath.
Pretty much every issue that we've put out, there have been at least one or two things that really surprised me. It sounds like bullshit, but most of the stories that we've run had that effect on me. We get thousands and thousands of submissions and I don't think we've published a story yet - very few, anyway - where there wasn't something like what Mona Simpson described, where a first sentence or a first page didn't just really command attention.
It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.
Mona Lisa looks as if she has just been sick, or is about to be.
Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.
Mona knocked at the wrong time. “Uh…yeah…wait a minute, Mona -- ” Mona shouted through the door. “Room service, gentlemen. Just pull the covers up. ” Michael grinned at Jon. “My roommate. Brace yourself. ” Seconds later, Mona burst through the doorway with a tray of coffee and croissants. “Hi! I’m Nancy Drew! You must be the Hardy Boys!
The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin.
Burn the Louvre, and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.
Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues; you can tell by the way she smiles.
Pat Nixon was called the Mona Lisa of American politics. She never wrote anything. Her interviews tell us nothing.
A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original.
Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.
You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa.
Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.
Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa.
How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover. ' This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001.
The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without realising it at the time.
I was to Japanese visitors to Washington what the Mona Lisa is to Americans visiting Paris.
