Lady Gaga comes face to face with the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and uses lipstick to draw a smile on her face in a new video clip released Wednesday by the singer and the French museum.
The American diva who stars in the new Joker movie, channelled her Harley Quinn character to do a little bit of lipstick “vandalism” to Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece to promote the Louvre’s new exhibition, Figures of the Fool, which like the movie, opens next month.
Lady Gaga creeps through the Paris museum at night in a red wig singing a song composed specially for the video, which was released on her Instagram and TikTok accounts.
She ends up nose-to-nose with the Mona Lisa before painting a clownish smile in lipstick on the protective glass in front of it. As she stands back, a black mascara tear drops from the star’s eye.
Asked about the wisdom of encouraging such gestures at a time when paintings are regularly being attacked in museums by climate activists, the Louvre insisted the video was “purely fictional”, and was a homage to Leonardo, who was obsessed by the smile.
The museum insisted that an additional screen had been put up for the video in front of the 3.8-centimetre-thick (1.5-inch) bulletproof one that protects the canvas.
The lipstick smile is an echo of a key scene in The Joker: Folie a Deux, when Harley Quinn visits The Joker, her criminal soulmate, in jail.
The Louvre said they worked with Warner Bros Pictures, the Hollywood studio who made the movie, who shot the video in the museum.
This is not the first time the Louvre has been a playground of the stars.
Rapper and producer Will.i.am famously put himself into some of the museum’s best known paintings for his 2016 animated video for Mona Lisa Smile, including taking the reins of Napoleon’s white charger.
Two years later Beyonce and Jay-Z filmed their clip Apeshit, using Gericault’s iconic The Raft of the Medusa, the Mona Lisa, and the coronation of Napoleon to make some pithy points about black people’s place, and the lack of it, in classical art history.
More recently the Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, created a buzz with its images of a private visit given to singer Celine Dion before she sang at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in July.