The Mona Lisa is the most copied painting in the world, so one more copy disappears.
She’s on mugs, tote bags and mouse pads. Duchamp gave her a mustache, Warhol printed her over and over, and Banksy handed her a rocket launcher. A straight reproduction hanging on a wall reads as a poster somebody forgot. For someone to stop, look twice and decide to take it home, the piece had to be unmistakably the Mona Lisa and unmistakably something else at the same time.
That took a few tries.
A stenciled comic-book face with four startled eyes, MONA above and LISA below, in a wavy gold frame. It went up first and was gone within a day, which proved the main thing: people will take it.
But it didn’t look like the Mona Lisa. It looked like a joke about her name.
Next came Lucille Ball’s face, stenciled between the same two words. Lucy fixed the face problem. If the Mona Lisa is the most recognized face in art, Lucy might be the most recognized face in television.
But a face and two words still read more like a sign than a painting.
So the words came off and the painting came back, as a new Lisa. She keeps Leonardo’s pose, the folded hands and the dark dress, and borrows Lucy’s big lashes, arched brows and dark lips.
You can tell what she is from across the street, and up close she’s someone new.
Recognition is a kind of power. A face you already know gets your attention before you’ve agreed to give it. It feels like running into someone, and people walk toward it.
Leonardo’s Lisa has five hundred years of that. Lucy has I Love Lucy, the most-watched show in America for four of its six seasons, and seventy years later people still know her on sight. Borrowing a little of Lucy gives the new Lisa that pull twice. She’s familiar from the painting and familiar from TV, and it takes a second to work out why.
The rubber faces, the crying, the grape stomping: Lucy worked hard to make all of it look easy. A little of the most famous funny face mixed into the most famous straight face in painting makes the new Lisa look like she’s in on the joke.
Each Mona Lucy goes into a gold frame with L.H.O.O.Q. hand-lettered on the bottom rail. The back gets a QR code and a certificate of authenticity. They’re made in a small run, and every copy is numbered.
A Mona on a wall is only half done. Whoever takes it home finishes it, which is the collaboration this whole project runs on. If you’re holding one, it’s yours now.
Yours has a certificate of authenticity attached to the back. Keep it with the piece, and please don’t post it online.
