A good preparation in the present would be to visit the Louvre (if you haven’t done so already) and make for the gallery in which the Mona Lisa is displayed to a crowd: a fortress wall of blinking, clicking cameras, all taking bad, vaguely recognizable pictures of the picture, whose function is not to preserve and transmit information about Leonardo’s painting but to commemorate the fact that the camera’s owner was once in some kind of proximity to the insanely desired icon.
