Mona Lisa Is Now A Space Explorer

           Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa' is one of the world's most recognizable paintings and paradoxically, probably the least truly looked at image in contemporary life. Its become so ubiquitous and so manipulated, with its use on credit cards, t-shirts, websites, social networks, TV shows, etc., that who the hell nowadays actually takes the time to experience the actual Mona Lisa? Art Critics and Art Historians and Academic aficionados? (Of course this all points to a much larger issue I have with Art in 21st century life but will not digress into at present.)You might answer: all the millions of tourists or visitors who go to the Louvre each year. Right? Well, not so much as you find out when you actually go to the Louvre to see for yourself as I had the chance to last summer.

          I mean, I didn't go to the Louvre with this as my purpose in mind, but I was certainly curious. Anyways as soon as you locate where in the museum the painting resides, you enter in and see a throbbing mass of people with their cell phone cameras out and clogging in front of the small, framed, object. Nobody is actually looking at the actual painting. 

          A million digital pictures are being taken through various quality cameras. Hours and hours of digital video accumulates and incorporates the crowd and the noise and the other picture takers. I bulldozed in as far as I could, got the best look I could but the swarm was too much for me and a few minutes later, I retreated. 

         Did you know that just the other day NASA( you remember them) beamed a digital image of the Mona Lisa 240,000 miles to a Satellite near the Moon? Its part of experiments in communication between earth and space and to eventually transmit information through space. There's a brief thing about it on slate.com. You might want to check it out.

         NASA broke down the image by a 152 by 200 pixel grid and then used a lazer to send it. Special software then rebuilt the image when it arrived and corrected all sorts of blemishes and fragments caused by the journey itself. Its safe to say the mona lisa is now the most fucked with image of a painting of all time. And it also reminds me of something William Burroughs wrote--something to the effect of "when scientists with all their money and gadgets discover the outer reaches of space, they'll find that artists got there first." Something like that. It also reminds me that when it comes to art works nowadays, we live in a 'surface' culture.