Your Thoughts On Art

[Belacqua]

Sam Harris brought up an interesting thought experiment.
What exactly makes the Mona Lisa so precious and valuable?

It's a little strange to me that people would pay attention to Harris on this question, given the fact that people who actually know about art have been discussing the same thing for centuries. 

Still, it's a reasonable question, and one that has a number of serious answers. 

If a perfect replica was to hang in its place, would it still have the same impact on its audience who were none the wiser?
Then it's obviously not the actual painting but the notion that it was painted by a renaissance genius?

Sad to say, the Mona Lisa is more or less invisible today. It's behind inches of bulletproof glass and a thousand tourists holding up their smart phones. In a sense, we can say that very few people have really seen it in recent decades -- face to face, without a ridiculous amount of interference. 

At this point I think you're right that what people go to see is the reputation. It's famous for being famous, and probably 90% of the tourists in the room at any given time couldn't tell you why it's more important than, say, Grant Wood's American Gothic. 

But I have heard lectures by those curators who have had it out of the case, all to themselves. And they are unanimous that it's a wonderful painting. Better than the Titian in the same room? That's hard to say. 

There are, however, good reasons to see it as a wonderful valuable object. Partly because of the "aura," of course. Leonardo was an amazing man. But also because of its place in history, its advanced and near-superhuman technique, the influence it had on Raphael and others. And it's just an amazingly beautiful object -- something I can extrapolate from having spent time with similar less famous pictures, and from the reports of more expert people. 

Science hasn't yet figured out how to do a molecule-by-molecule replica of the way paintings like that are made. They are painstakingly glazed and reglazed with semi-transparent oil color, to give the paint a depth and richness that no photograph can capture. It isn't just the color, it's the physical quality of the paint -- its translucency, its thickness or touch, etc. Those guys in those days knew exactly how to make the white highlights, for example, a micro-millimeter thicker than the surrounding paint so its top edge would catch just a little bit of the room light, making the light effect more real -- again, something that is visible neither in photos nor behind inches of glass. 

So my answer to Harris would be that there are real, defensible, articulable reasons why that painting is wonderful, valuable, important. But those are not the reasons why people go to see it, for the most part.