And The Mona Lisa Smiled...

Why is The Mona Lisa considered as the most famous painting ever?

No doubt, it was considered a great painting even when it was commissioned, but it began to gain the iconic status it enjoys today only in the 19th century and more so in the 20th century.

For the first few centuries, it was confined mainly to the walls of the palaces of the royalty. In those days, in addition to the techniques used in the painting, what ascribed a certain enigma to the painting was the speculation about the model - the face of the painting.

In the 19th century, the painting was moved from the palace of Napolean Bonaparte to the Louvre Museum which, triggered by the mystique that surrounded the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, brought hordes of visitors to the painting.

The Absence was more powerful than the Presence

While the writers of the 19th century aroused interest in the painting, it was the theft of the painting in 1911 that created a media frenzy which brought it world-wide attention. When the news of the heist broke out, people flocked to the Louvre to gape at the empty space, where the painting had once hung.

The director of the museum resigned and the accusations of hoax about the crime became rampant. The legendary painter Pablo Picasso was even arrested as one of the suspects.

The painting was recovered two years later, but by then the French had already started regarding it as a National Treasure that was lost and recovered.

In 1919, Marcel Darchamp started a campaign against the Masterpiece. He drew a beard and moustache on the lady's face and inscribed the acronym L.H.O.O.Q. (a vulgar phrase in French) at the bottom. The irreverence generated by this disfigurement caused the admirers of this work to harden their stand and was so endlessly reproduced by artists all over the world that it became the most well-known face in the world of art.

Often, a lot goes in making of any masterpiece, far more than the content and the quality of the artwork itself. Look at the history of anything that generates mass paranoia, and you will find incidents with strong emotions attached.

This is what provided them the initial aura. That aura, then further drew in the masses and continue to do so.

The whole process had very little to do with the acknowledgement of the brilliance of the content involved.

It was the absence of the Mona Lisa that brought in more visitors than her Presence. It was the irreverence shown to her that transformed her into a work worthy of worship.

What makes a Masterpiece?

How many of the masterpieces are really masterpieces?

We often come across a work of art that people didn't give much credence to when they were created.

Then one day, the work gets auctioned at 100+ millions USD. As this news spreads, while some continue to dismiss it and mock the idiosyncrasies and silliness of the world of art, many artists, art-lovers and art-critics may actually begin to discover amazing intricacies in the art that can be understood only by a deep exploration and an acute perception.

We approach every creation that has gained an iconic status differently from how we receive a creation by a friend who we do not give much credence to.

Whatever we intend to seek, we find.

If we want to figure out why a creation is iconic, we will find endless reasons for the same. If we intend to dismiss something as silly and stupid, we find countless reasons for that, too.

We approach any creation or message based on the inherent aura that it carries.

Whether something is effective, impactful, mesmerizing, breath-taking or whether something is lousy, silly or worthless depends on far many factors than just content alone.

"I want my work to speak for itself"

Imagine what disaster those who indulge in virtue-signalling of the nature "I want my work to speak for itself" cause to themselves.

We indulge in a similar passive approach to life everywhere - whether we wait for our work at home to be appreciated by the family out of their good-will, or whether we expect our colleagues and bosses to acknowledge our capability on their own initiative, we invariably deny "Communication" its rightful place in our scheme of existence - as a tool of creation.

Nothing speaks for itself. We are the ones who need to speak - for ourselves, for our lives and for our work - in a way that can be received, understood, acknowledged, appreciated and acted upon.

"Content" is NOT the King

How often do we experience this: I get a bright idea - a poem, a story, an insight. I write it down, thoroughly enjoying the experience of writing. I overflow with excitement and inspiration as I pen those words down.

At that moment, it feels like the best thing ever written.

I come back to it the next day, and it feels quite ordinary.

After a few days, I read it again and wonder - did I really write this crap?

What changed from the point of conceiving the idea to the moment it is read after a few days?

Our initial reactions to what we created did not come solely from the brilliance of the idea, but from the surge of creative energy that accompanied the creative process. We felt exhilarated not because of the content we created, but because of the gush of the creative energy that accompanied it.

When that surge of creative energy dies down, so does our jubilation about the content.

We do realize this abundantly from our day-to-day experience, but we do hold on to the popular notions around communication because of the absence of alternative perspectives.

Like the famed story about a man searching for his needle in the streetlights, we continue to search for our lost needles under the lamp posts of the streets, although we know without a trace of doubt that we actually lost the needle inside our house.

We know very well what works with communication and what doesn't, but we hold on to the misconceived notions because everyone else does it.

This journey is an attempt to take our attention to finding things where they most likely exist, rather than deluding ourselves by trying to locate them where they don't.

The rudest awakening we need to undergo in the world of communication is to realize- "content" is NOT the king.

In fact, it is not even the janitor.

The Exhilaration Doesn't Come from Content

When an aspiring entrepreneur gets a great idea, he is swept away by the same exhilaration of creative energy. If the idea really resonates with him, he may spend days and nights mulling over it, thinking through it in all details, dreaming on how it's going to change the world, fantasizing about how it would catapult his professional career and bring in loads of money and fame.

He immerses himself into an exponentially expanding surge of creative energy.

This is what makes his idea so special to him. The countless hours, days, nights, weeks, months and years of immersion in this ocean of passionate energy is what creates that sense of exuberance and vivacity about his ideas.

This is what makes him believe that he has stumbled upon the next best thing in the world.

When he goes out to share this idea with others, he totally ignores the importance of transferring the volcano of his euphoria around the idea. What the others get is just a plain, straightforward articulation of the ideas and its potential, and it fails completely in triggering that elation and the rush of adrenaline in the recipients of the communication that he has lived through.

Every time, we complain about the world's inability to understand or support us, we are actually conveying about inability to transfer our passion.

Communication involves not only the transfer of a message, content or information, but an induction of one's entire state of being and consciousness. Without the right inner state, no message would have any perceptible impact on the world.

The stage-wise pipeline of Communication

"Expression" is a complex process. However, it is very structured.

There is an entire hierarchy?involved in the process, which begins from a subtle intent, a thought form, which gradually gets translated to words, gestures, body-language and tonality in stepwise stages of transformation.

It undergoes a wide range of metamorphosis in its intangible state before it appears in its tangible form.

This transformation depends on a wide range of factors that includes permanent factors like our personality, habits, training, etc. as well as transient factors, like moods, context, inter-personnel dynamics, etc.

On the flip side, even the receiving of the tangible forms of expression goes through a similar process in reverse. The audible words and tonality and the visible body language and gesticulations go through a similar pipeline of stage-wise transformations before we make sense of it as an intent or a thought-form.

The understanding of this funnel of expression is the secret that we will learn to unravel in this course of journey. This is what would provide us the key to understand both the encoding and decoding mechanisms of human communication, and we will discover how to use them to maximum effectiveness.

The Journey of the Art of Orchestrating our World

This journey is intended to help us move beyond resenting the heartlessness and the unfairness of the world and master the skillof using communication as the tool of creation and manifestation that it really is.

The journey so far has been aimed at questioning what goes around as "communication". We have been exploring the misconceptions around communication and challenging the notions that are held so sacrosanct, but which are totally irrelevant to the outcome of communication.

In this journey so far, we have been just making an attempt to lift the veil and get a glimpse of what really exists in the world of communication.

Having sufficiently established what it is to communicate, and what it is NOT to communicate, and having got a fair degree of what magic we can create with the art of communication, we will now begin that segment of the journey where we go deep into the precise mechanisms of how to use Communication as the art of orchestrating our world.

Rather than continuing to search at a given place because it is already well-lit, we will venture to bring light of our awareness to those places which actually conceal the resources we need to master communication as an art of orchestrating our world.

As mentioned in the first part of this series, if the world is indeed "Maya", if everything is indeed a game, let us play it like a pro.

The journey begins now...

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