Putting art on the couch

In 1911, when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, crowds came to gawk at the empty space where the painting had hung -- many more people than had come to see the painting itself. Why, you ask? Well, slide the shrink’s couch into the gallery as a psychoanalyst delves into the often impenetrable world of art theory to try to answer that question.

In his recent book “Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing,” Darian Leader, a founding member of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research in London, uses the event as a framework for questioning what roles art plays in our lives -- why we look at it, why artists create it, why civilization requires it -- and the psychology behind those roles.

With such unlikely analyses as a comparison of the price of art with what he was once asked to pay for a can of Coke in a whorehouse, and an easy fluency in the languages of film and popular culture, “Stealing the Mona Lisa” is surely not your average obtuse theory volume. Leader looks provocatively past our objects of desire and finds meaning in what lies beyond the frame.

Why do we look at art?

We look at art in order to search for something -- it gives us a particular place where we can search for something that we can’t see. There’s always something beyond the frame -- not just what we see but what we don’t see -- and it’s what we don’t see that we often desire. It’s quite mysterious. All art is a way of trapping something or freezing something about human desire.

Funny, that’s never what we seem to talk about when we talk about art.

When people talk about art, they always assume it’s a viewer looking at an artwork and that’s all that’s going on, and what the book argues is it’s quite a bit more complicated -- not just the painting but the place it occupies.

So, that relationship is central to civilization -- that part of what we’re not “seeing”?

Right. There’s no such thing as civilization without the presence of a place for art. What that place consists of is a way of saying something about the whole process of how civilization happens in the first place. Things are arbitrary and we accept that to function as humans in society. But art creates a space within itself to comment about what makes it so -- about what makes our world and why.

But yet art is always something owned by the wealthy -- it’s perhaps the most expensive thing on Earth, if you measure material against price. Is this a fundamental aspect of art’s role in our culture?

Sure. Art through its price mirrors the process of separating the symbolic world from the world of empirical objects. There’s no natural relation between objects and the value we give to objects. Take when Andy Warhol signed bank notes and dramatically increased their value -- they were the same pieces of paper, but they were suddenly worth more. That shows this gap that makes civilization possible in context -- it’s responsible for assigning value. It’s like the $1,000 price tag on that can of Coke in my book.

You pose the question in your book about whether, when the Mona Lisa was squirreled away in hiding after its theft, with nobody -- not even the thief -- looking at it, it was still art. What is the relation between the object we call art and where it is shown?

We have to distinguish the empty place that artwork occupies and the actual empirical object itself. When the object goes into that space [the gallery, the museum, the blank living room wall], it becomes art. That space is something that each civilization creates for itself. It’s a cultural space, an idea -- we can’t see it. So what art is doing is continuously evoking a special sacred space for us, which we wouldn’t be able to see otherwise.

What painting would you steal?

I’d have to go for the Mona Lisa. It would be pretty second rate to have written this whole book and go into the art theft biz and not steal it myself.

-- Lauren Sandler