In July of last year, a man named Sidney Sealine went to see the Mona Lisa in Paris.
The idea was to spend some time with the picture, see for himself the special spark that made the painting so famous.
But Sealine couldn't even get close.
In his video of the visit, you see people of every race and nationality crowded around the barricades that separate them from the painting. They're holding cameras over their heads and snapping pictures like paparazzi at a movie opening while the Mona Lisa gazes out at them.
A surprisingly small portrait, it is separated from the crazed crowd by a series of wooden railings and an enormous slab of darkly tinted bulletproof glass.
It's a painting so successful it requires constant protection from the public, and so it can hardly be seen.
Why Is The Mona Lisa – Or Any Piece Of Art – Successful?
The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because people believe that there is something profoundly special about it, some quality so distinguishing that it deserves to be as famous as it is.
But is that true?
Several years ago, Princeton professor Matthew Salganik started thinking about success, specifically about how much of success should be attributed to the inherent qualities of the successful thing itself, and how much was just chance. For some essentially random reason, a group of people decided that the thing in question was really good and their attention attracted more attention until there was a herd of people who believed it was special mostly because all the other people believed that it was, but the successful thing wasn't in fact that special.
“ It is hard to make things of very poor quality succeed — though after you meet a basic standard of quality, what becomes a huge hit and what doesn't is essentially a matter of chance.