It looks like the Louvre is playing a part in the run-up to Joker: Folie à Deux, the long-awaited sequel to the 2019 film, Joker, for which Joaquin Phoenix landed an Academy Award for portraying Batman’s nemesis. This time, Lady Gaga is playing the Joker’s infamous partner-in-crime Lee Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn. Accompanying the movie, which hits theaters on October 4, the pop star is dropping a concept album around the movie on Friday. A clip of that album’s first music video caused a stir this morning, as the world watched Lady Gaga draw a smile on the Mona Lisa.
The 80-second video starts with Gaga’s Harley Quinn looking out on the Louvre. The music is somber, and she’s dressed as an innocent, disheveled waif. Next, she’s walking down the empty, dark museum’s stone steps, gazing at paintings and sculptures of singular men along the way. Then, the electric guitar enters, the lighting turns from cool to warm, and Harley Quinn encounters the Mona Lisa. Harley Quinn’s grin captures her intimacy with the work’s lifelike smirk. She pulls out her lipstick. The video is shot to clearly show she’s scrawling protective glass, rather than Leonardo da Vinci’s actual painting.
It’s not the first time the Mona Lisa has been given such a makeover. Duchamp famously portrayed the figure with a mustache, and in 2016, singer Nicole Scherzinger’s face was imposed atop hers in the video for Will.i.am’s “Mona Lisa Smile,” its video also set in the Louvre. Still, some have wondered whether Gaga’s new video promotes vandalism amid ongoing demonstrations.
The Louvre, however, considers Harley Quinn and Mona Lisa a match made in heaven. In a release, the French institution noted that Harley Quinn’s beau, the Joker, and the Mona Lisa are both renowned for their smiles. They share etymological roots, too. The portrait famously immortalizes the wife of Florentine gentleman Francesco del Giocondo, whose name means “happy” in Italian, drawing from the same Latin work, “Jocus,” or joke, underpinning “Joker.”
Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel, a.k.a. Harley Quinn, in Joker: Folie à Deux (2024). Photo courtesy of the Louvre Museum.
What’s more, unhinged figures abound throughout art. Some would even say such characters drive it. Gaga’s latest video arrives less than a month before the Louvre’s “serendipitous” forthcoming show, “Figures of the Fool,” unveils in their newly renovated Hall Napoléon. The exhibition will explore how archetypal fools reappeared in the art of the Middle Ages through the Renaissance—parsing their pictorial and societal utility. The show will also find presence in absence, charting the fool’s disappearance following the dawn of Enlightenment.
Portrait of a madman looking through his fingers (1537). ©Anvers, The Phoebus Foundation. Courtesy of the Louvre.
“The fool came to occupy every available artistic space, insinuating himself into illuminated manuscripts, printed books and engravings, tapestries, paintings, sculptures, and all manner of objects both precious and mundane,” the museum explained. “His fascinating, perplexing and subversive figure loomed large in the turmoil of an era not so different from our own.”
“Are the fools of today those of yesterday?” the show will ask.
Take it from Joker: Folie a Deux—the fool has certainly returned.
“Figures of the Fool” is on view at the Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 16, 2024–February 3, 2025