The work became one of Duchamp’s most discussed pieces and one of the defining gestures of the Dada movement. Its logic — using the most famous artwork in the world as a readymade to comment on artistic celebrity — only worked because the Mona Lisa was, by 1919, the specific cultural object most associated with the idea of a famous painting. The theft had, among its effects, made the Mona Lisa into the universal reference point for the concept of an iconic artwork.
Andy Warhol’s series of Mona Lisa silkscreens in the 1960s extended this logic into the pop era. Warhol’s work — multiplying the image, flattening it, applying it in grids and color variations — treated the Mona Lisa as it treated Campbell’s soup cans: as a commercial image so saturated with reproduction that the distinction between the original and its copies had been functionally erased. The original painting in the Louvre was no longer more present in the culture than its ten-millionth reproduction; Warhol’s work made that reality explicit.
The 1963 American tour demonstrated the specific form the painting’s fame had taken in the United States. When President Kennedy attended the opening at the National Gallery in Washington — welcoming the painting as a cultural envoy from France — the event had the quality of a diplomatic summit. The painting had been lent by France to the United States as a gesture of cultural friendship, and its arrival generated the kind of celebrity attention that belonged to public figures rather than objects.
The 40,000 visitors per day who came to the Washington venue came for many reasons. Some came as genuine art enthusiasts. Some came because they had grown up seeing the image everywhere and wanted to see the original. Some came because seeing the Mona Lisa had become, by that point, one of the specific experiences that confirmed cultural participation — something you could tell people you had done.