Move Over, Mona Lisa: Reimagining What We Read, Look AT, and Learn

Calls to include a wider range of art, literature, and ideas in the world’s classrooms, libraries, and museums are loud and clear. If so many agree that reforms are needed, why is change so slow?

The answer is the inequality pipeline--the multiple obstacles that ideas and art needs to overcome to circulate globally. Most strategies to disrupt the pipeline only increase inclusivity, without fundamentally challenging institutional hierarchies. In Move Over, Mona Lisa, Peggy Levitt reveals, through her conversations with creatives, thinkers, and professionals working in the cultural and academic worlds in Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea, that another approach to combatting global cultural and intellectual inequality is underway.

Like-minded actors outside of traditional cultural centers are creating new nodes of power, and new pathways which connect them, that allow art, books, and ideas to, ＂travel from Buenos Aires to Mexico City without having to pass through Madrid.＂ They are circumventing traditional powerbrokers and boldly reconfiguring the cultural and intellectual order. Levitt’s journey begins where art and literature are first created; then takes us to where they get discovered, circulated, exhibited, and acquired; and concludes where they are researched, published about, and taught. Along the way, we meet visionary artists, out-of-the box writers, committed activists, and teachers striving to define what it means to train truly global citizens. We also discover how the culture and history of the cities they work from influences what they do.

By linking these ideas together, Levitt persuasively demonstrates that what happens in the museum or the library is integrally connected to what happens in institutions of higher learning. With deeply researched, novel insights, ambition, and hope, Move Over, Mona Lisa offers nothing short of a new theory of global cultural and intellectual change.

Peggy Levitt is the Mildred Lane Kemper Professor, and Chair of Sociology at Wellesley College. She is the co-founder of the Global (De)Centre. She is the author, most recently, of Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (2015), among many other publications.