Consider the Mona Lisa. A modest portrait, roughly two feet tall, depicting an unremarkable Florentine woman with an enigmatic half-smile. Today it commands bulletproof glass and daily pilgrimages from thousands. Yet for centuries after its creation, it languished in relative obscurity—admired, certainly, but hardly venerated as civilization's supreme pictorial achievement.

What changed wasn't the painting. The pigments remained fixed, the sfumato technique unaltered. What transformed was the elaborate machinery of cultural valuation that surrounds it—the critics who rhapsodized, the thieves who stole it (boosting its fame immeasurably), the institutions that enshrined it, the reproduction technologies that made it omnipresent.

This raises uncomfortable questions for anyone who believes in artistic greatness. If masterpiece status depends on such contingent forces, does 'greatness' name something real in the work itself? Or does it describe a consensus we've manufactured—a collective hallucination dressed in the language of eternal value?

The canon—that informal list of works deemed essential to cultural literacy—presents itself as natural selection operating on aesthetic merit. The best rises; the mediocre sinks. This narrative flatters our sense that we can recognize genuine quality. It also happens to be largely mythological.

Arthur Danto argued that what makes something art at all depends on an artworld—a network of theories, institutions, and practices that confer artistic status. The same logic applies to greatness. A work becomes a masterpiece when sufficient institutional weight accumulates behind it: museum acquisitions, critical essays, scholarly attention, auction records, educational curricula, coffee table books.

Consider how the Impressionists achieved canonical status. Initially rejected by the Salon, they organized independent exhibitions, cultivated sympathetic critics, attracted adventurous collectors, and eventually benefited from dealers who recognized their commercial potential. Their triumph required not just talent but infrastructure—an alternative system of validation that could challenge official taste.

Museums play a particularly decisive role. When an institution acquires a work, it implicitly declares: this matters. The purchase triggers scholarship, which generates citations, which ensures continued attention, which justifies future institutional investment. It's a feedback loop that can perpetuate itself indefinitely, making canonical status increasingly difficult to dislodge once established.

Takeaway

Masterpieces aren't discovered—they're constructed through institutional processes that reward certain kinds of work while rendering others invisible. Understanding this machinery doesn't diminish great art, but it should make us curious about what the machinery has missed.

If canons were simply records of objective quality, they would remain stable. They don't. The history of taste is littered with dramatic reversals—artists elevated from obscurity, others tumbling from pedestals that once seemed permanent.

Vermeer painted quietly in seventeenth-century Delft, then virtually vanished from cultural memory. Two centuries later, a French critic named Théophile Thoré-Bürger rediscovered him, publishing passionate advocacy that gradually transformed Vermeer into the luminous master we now consider self-evidently great. Without Thoré-Bürger's intervention, would we see the same qualities in those paintings? Perhaps. But we might never have looked.

Canon revision often reflects broader cultural shifts. The feminist art historians of the 1970s didn't simply argue that neglected women artists deserved attention—they demonstrated how the very criteria defining greatness had been gendered. Qualities associated with 'major' art (monumentality, public significance, heroic ambition) mapped suspiciously onto work men were permitted to make. Qualities associated with 'minor' genres (domesticity, decorative refinement, intimacy) described the spheres to which women were confined.

This suggests that expansion isn't merely additive—including more artists while preserving existing standards. Genuine revision interrogates the standards themselves. It asks: what assumptions about significance have we mistaken for neutral aesthetic judgment? The answer typically reveals that what seemed universal was actually particular—shaped by the perspectives of whoever controlled the institutions of valuation.

Takeaway

Every canon reflects the blind spots of its creators. When canons change, it's rarely because we've become more generous—it's because we've recognized that our previous criteria were narrower than we thought.

Knowing that canonical judgments are constructed doesn't mean abandoning evaluation altogether. It means taking responsibility for your own aesthetic commitments rather than outsourcing them to institutional authority.

This requires developing what we might call critical fluency—the capacity to articulate why certain works resonate while remaining open to revision. It's neither uncritical acceptance of received opinion nor reflexive contrarianism. You engage seriously with established judgments while recognizing them as arguments to be assessed, not verdicts to be accepted.

Start by noticing your actual responses. When a canonically great work leaves you cold, investigate that indifference rather than performing appreciation you don't feel. When an obscure work moves you unexpectedly, take that response seriously enough to understand it. Your genuine reactions are data—they reveal something about the encounter between your particular sensibility and this particular object.

Then contextualize those responses. What do critics and scholars say about this work? What historical circumstances shaped it? How has its reputation shifted over time? This isn't about subordinating your judgment to expertise but enriching it. Understanding why the Impressionists were once derided as incompetent helps you see their work with fresh eyes—you perceive the radical choices that familiarity has rendered invisible. Your personal canon becomes informed but not dictated, responsive to broader conversations while remaining genuinely yours.

Takeaway

The goal isn't to escape cultural influence—that's impossible—but to engage with it consciously. A personal canon worth having is one you've actively constructed through sustained attention, honest response, and willingness to think for yourself.

The question 'what makes art great?' has no stable answer because it's really two questions intertwined. One concerns the properties of objects—their formal achievements, their capacity to generate meaning, their technical innovations. The other concerns the social processes through which certain objects acquire cultural authority.

Neither question reduces to the other. Great works possess qualities that reward sustained attention, but those qualities don't announce themselves. They require interpreters, institutions, and contexts that make them visible.

Perhaps the most honest response to canonical art is neither reverence nor skepticism but engaged curiosity. These works have accumulated extraordinary attention across time. What did all those people see? What might you see that they missed? The canon is an invitation to look carefully—not a command to bow.