Move Over, Mona Lisa - by Peggy Levitt (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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 need 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.

Review Quotes

"Move Over, Mona Lisa provides finely tuned direction that urges us forward. Step by step Peggy Levitt links the commitments and actions she witnesses and celebrates, to a wider context of specific and actionable goals and outcomes. Her work is deeply felt, carefully argued, and inspiring in effect." --Matthew Teitelbaum, former director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Art emerging from outside of the western axis must be read from within its own context. Levitt's decentered cultural globalization lays out how to accomplish this with depth and clarity, employing the interplay of visual and literary cultures to dig deeply into this timely and necessary approach." --Saleh Barakat, owner of Saleh Barakat Gallery and Agial Art Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon

"Beyond assessing global inequalities in the arts, literature and the academy, Peggy Levitt reveals how a decentering ethos drives cultural initiatives in various cities and regions around the world. In the midst of the current geopolitical backlash, she provides us with a rich and compelling account of the alternative cultural world ordering that her book so vividly uncovers." --Johan Heilbron, European Center of Sociology and Political Science

"Centering case studies from Korea, Lebanon, and Argentina, Peggy Levitt distinguishes between soft reform and deep structural change, pairing sharp critique with workable proposals. It's a book that will invite serious debate in museums, universities, publishing houses, and funding room alike." --Joan Weinstein, Director of the Getty Foundation

"Intellectual dependency in the context of the social sciences and humanities has been studied for decades, but less analytical work on the phenomenon has been done in the context of art and literary production. Move Over, Mona Lisa helps us understand how this dependency can be overcome, thereby advancing the theory and practice of the decolonization of knowledge." --Syed Farid Alatas, professor of sociology and anthropology, National University of Singapore

"Peggy Levitt offers a bracing, globe-spanning rethinking of the cultural pipelines that move art, literature, and ideas, and determine who gets left behind. Equal parts pragmatist and dreamer, she reveals a cultural world already decentered yet still constrained by uneven resources, institutions, and access. This is a smart, generous, and deeply illuminating book that changes how we see global culture." --Clayton Childress, author of Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel

"Peggy Levitt's Move Over, Mona Lisa joins a long-standing conversation about how to decentralize cultural globalization but does this through a meticulous appraisal not just of the cultural products we consume but the fundamental ways in which we are encouraged to see and experience culture in today's world." --Ato Quayson, Jean G. and Morris M. Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Stanford University

"This is the book we have been waiting for. Levitt vividly weaves together the voices and organizational innovations of decentering practitioners worldwide: notably, those cultural pioneers in Argentina, Korea, and Lebanon engaged in disrupting the 'global inequality pipeline.' Move Over, Mona Lisa illustrates how to decolonize in practical, engaged, and performative terms--a rare work that practices what it preaches." --Adrian Favell, director of the Radical Humanities Lab, University College Cork

"This powerful book and research remind us of how a decentered world of culture had been started to be imagined before it just recently was deeply disrupted. Peggy Levitt offers a hopeful perspective and guides us, along with a variety of voices, on how to continue the path to greater cultural and intellectual equality." --Barbara Plankensteiner, director of Museum am Rothenbaum

"Where many accounts of world literature take a birds-eye view, Levitt looks deeply into the mechanisms that make world literature run. The result is a fine-trained analysis of publishing networks that are changing what--and who--gets published. It's like watching world literature evolve in real time." --Martin Puchner Harvard University

About the Author

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.