I would change the Mona Lisa by Da Vinci to the size of a postcard. I don’t get the hype behind it and the stories surrounding it aren’t that interesting. Seeing crowds of people swarming around it with their camera phones mostly because of the status it beholds is irritating, most people visit the Louvre just to see this painting. Da Vinci has much more fascinating things and I prefer Lady With An Ermine because it has an ermine.
There’s such a detachment with this piece, I don’t like that it’s barred off and in a glass wall, there’s no chance of intimacy with it, any possibility of there being something fascinating about the painting is surely lost through all this.
In making the painting smaller all I’d want to achieve is to waste peoples time more, they wouldn’t just be going to see a boring portrait feet away behind barriers and a glass wall, they’d be struggling even more to see the painting. They’d probably find this disappointingly over-hyped painting more disappointing because when I’ve seen art in real life that has turned out smaller than expected it has disappointed me. I don’t think this painting is worth much more than a faded memory on a cracked phone or part of a three-part series aired on BBC4 at 3 in the morning.