Queues, crowds and a shrinking sense of wonder. These are the works everyone photographs and plenty of people quietly regret travelling for.
1Balloon DogKoons's mirror-polished steel balloon animal, made in five colours and priced like a house.1000pts
2Girl with a BalloonBanksy's stencil, which shredded itself at auction and promptly became worth more.777pts
3The Little MermaidCopenhagen's harbour statue, routinely voted the most underwhelming sight in Scandinavia.678pts
4Campbell's Soup CansWarhol's 32 canvases of soup tins, endlessly reproduced and endlessly argued over.555pts
5FountainDuchamp's 1917 urinal, signed R. Mutt — the original is lost and every version is a replica.555pts
6Manneken PisBrussels' urinating boy: 61 centimetres tall and permanently ringed by disappointed tourists.555pts
7American GothicGrant Wood's farm couple, worn smooth by a century of parody.555pts
8ComedianCattelan's banana duct-taped to a wall, sold in 2019 and eaten more than once since.0pts
9Mona LisaSmall, dim and behind glass at the end of a 20,000-a-day queue — the Louvre is building it a separate room.0pts
10The ScreamMunch's howling figure, now a phone emoji and a poster before it is a painting.0pts
11The Persistence of MemoryDalí's melting clocks, a dorm-room poster long before it was a Surrealist landmark.0pts
12Black SquareMalevich's 1915 black square, the painting most often met with 'my child could do that'.0pts
13The Physical Impossibility of DeathHirst's tiger shark in formaldehyde, which had to be replaced when the first one rotted.0pts
14The KissKlimt's gilded embrace, sold as fridge magnets in every museum shop on the continent.0pts
Comments 1
Its own museum is spending a billion euros to move the painting into a room of its own by 2031, so 30,000 other works get looked at: https://youpick.best/articles/leonardo-da-vinci-ranked-many-ways
YP
ypb-teamAug 21
