Lady Gaga “vandalizes” the Mona Lisa, and this time the Louvre is all smiles

The museum released a video Wednesday showing the pop star doodling on the glass protecting the Mona Lisa. A gesture that has always been condemned by the institution when it comes to activists. But for the promotion, it’s a different story.

LOn January 29, two activists from Riposte alimentaire eluded the vigilance of the guards at the Louvre museum and sprayed pumpkin soup on the armored glass that permanently protects The Mona Lisa, before shouting their demands: “What is more important, art or the right to healthy and sustainable food?” The painting had not been damaged, but the reactions had nonetheless been strong – “No cause can justify his being targeted!” Culture Minister Rachida Dati raged on X – and the museum announced its intention to file a complaint, as it had already done in 2022, when a man threw a cream pie in the same place. Yesterday, Wednesday, September 25, we did not find any indignant tweets from politicians to denounce this new “vandalism”: a woman marked this window in red in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s work. But it must be said that the woman in question was Lady Gaga, and that it was the Louvre that had suggested she do it.

“I want to see the real you,” Harley Quinn says, drawing a thick line of lipstick on the prison visiting window that separates her from Arthur Fleck, aka the Joker, Batman’s greatest enemy. The camera angle shifts, until the crimson comma coincides with the inmate’s smile, which grows wider and wider. It is by seeing this sequence in the teaser of Joker: Madness for two, in April, that the teams at the Louvre Museum had this crazy idea: why not ask Lady Gaga, who plays this Harlequin character in Todd Phillips’ musical film, to play with the most famous smile in the world, namely that of the Mona Lisa? It would be a great promotion for the exhibition “Figures of the Madman. From the Middle Ages to the Romantics”, which is due to open on October 16, two weeks after the film’s release…

It’s hard to get more details on the exchanges that followed between the global pop star, the film’s producer, Warner Bros. Pictures, and the Parisian museum, since, unsurprisingly for this type of project, communication is very tight-lipped. But what we do know is that Lady Gaga – who had already visited the Louvre ten years ago for a series of videos by Bob Wilson – came to film at night, in early September, for what is not really a video clip, but an “original creation”, according to the museum. On a rock version of The Joker, a song composed in 1964 (already for a musical), and covered in 1968 by Shirley Bassey, we see Lady Gaga wandering through the galleries of an empty Louvre, before stopping in front of the Mona Lisa and redrawing her smile with Joker-style lipstick. The production costs were entirely covered by Warner, and the Louvre assures that it did not receive any money, being the initiator of the collaboration.

Since this is all so well thought out, Lady Gaga had first announced that she was releasing a “companion” album to the film. Joker: Madness for two, soberly titled Harlequin, and the next day, his video at the Louvre was simultaneously broadcast on his social networks and those of the museum. We can applaud this great marketing operation, which allows to promote a film, a record and an exhibition in one go. But we can also find it slightly hypocritical of the Louvre to stage, even for a fiction, a symbolic gesture that it has condemned several times in the past.