The Louvre in Paris is fast becoming the musée of choice for pop stars and film celebrities. The rapper Snoop Dogg, who was in Paris for the Olympics in August, was taken on a guided tour of the Parisian institution while the actress Natalie Portman also recently showed up at the revered Paris institution. In another canny marketing move, museum officials have invited pop superstar Lady Gaga in to the hallowed walls of the Louvre, allowing her to roam freely among famous statues and paintings such as The Winged Victory of Samothrace (190BC) for a new video.
Gaga’s Louvre outing marks the launch of an album linked to her new movie Joker: Folie à Deux (the singer is playing the Joker’s partner-in-crime Lee Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn, in the sequel to the 2019 hit film starring Joaquin Phoenix). “Inspired by her character Quinzel, Lady Gaga enters the rooms of the Louvre museum, as if in a dream, to experience a Folie à deux [Madness of Two] with the most iconic work of art, the Mona Lisa,” says a Louvre statement. In an audacious move, and thanks to some camera trickery, the Born This Way star is seen planting a huge smile, in lipstick, on the Mona Lisa.
The Louvre points out the connection between Leonardo’s masterpiece and the demented character of the Joker. “This welcoming smile, with its lively intelligence, creates an immediate and very effective communication with the viewer… At the time of its creation, this smile could also be interpreted as an onomastic game: ‘Giocondo’ means ‘happy; in Italian. La Gioconda [the Mona Lisa] is therefore a happy woman whose natural attribute is a smile. The Joker and the Mona Lisa share the same etymology: Jocus’ in Latin,” adds the museum statement.
The Louvre is also keen to plug its own show on the theme of folie. “Are today’s madmen the same as yesterday’s? This is one of the many questions that the Louvre’s new major autumn exhibition, Figures of the Madman. From the Middle Ages to the Romantics, aims to answer (opens 16 October),” adds a statement. So who’s having the last laugh?
