Thursday, May 6, 2010

Mona Lisa Mania

This blog post is about, well, Mona Lisa mania...The Mona Lisa is the most replicated and reproduced work of art in history. Below are examples of some of the most artistic reproductions to-date.

An individual for a small group: Korean designer Kwang Hoo Lee for a niche group of consumers (not including art historians, some of whom protested about the value of this painting being reporduced to sit on!).

Lee's chair is an example of a painting you can sit on. You can also choose to hang this chair on the wall when it is not in use, because the frame of the chair also acts as a frame to the replica.



A small group for a small group: A "commissioner" and an 3D artist for their community. Tania Ledger of Croydon England employeed a 3D artist named Chris Naylor to create the Mona Lisa Portrait sculpted into her lawn to promote a "Brighten Up Britian" campaign, a revelation encouraging Brits to combat the credit crunch misery by brightening up their homes and communities.

An individual for an individual: A tattoo artist from HeadOVMetal tattoo parlor took the below picture at the Seattle Tattoo Convention in 1995. This individual got a painfully artistic full-back tattoo of the Mona Lisa, a great example of the individual for an individual case, in which a tattoo artist tattooes the customer on the basis of personal desire.

A small group for a large group: ASUS management for ASUS employees who created a "Mona Lisa Motherboard". In the lobby of the Asus Headquarters (a multinational computer product corporation) in Peitou, Taiwan, a Mona Lisa is made entirely from recycled PC motherboards. Management says that "The work represents two things: a reminder of the technology that Asus built its fortune on and the company's ethos to encourage and support any kind of crazy idea".



A big group for a big group: Over 300 employees of Takashimaya's department store in Osaka, Japan for curious shoppers of the Takashimaya department store. The employees reproduced the Mona Lisa using 320,000 old train tickets obtained from the nearby Nankai Namba station. The reproduction consists of "pixels" formed by overlapping black and white tickets in intricate patterns. About 300 employees sacrificed their breaks and free time for three months to complete the masterpiece.