This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

The French polymath Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was never content to work in one mode—and was ostracized for it. His retrospective at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is titled “The Juggler’s Revenge”: it makes a case for this versatility, showing a cohesive spirit across works in film, sculpture, collage, drawing, literature, and jewelry.

No bother, Cocteau was unperturbed, impressively juggling this range of media. He inflected even his most commercial films with avant-garde impulses. An excerpt from his 1930 Surrealist film Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) features a handsome shirtless man communing with an anthropomorphic armless Classical sculpture. At one point, the man finds a pair of animate lips on his palm, which he then transfers to the sculpture. The sculpture, now equipped with a mouth, instructs the man to go through the looking glass, so he positions himself along its frame and presses his body against it. Suddenly, he splashes through, as if into a swimming pool, and falls into the abyss.

By 1953, Cocteau served as the jury president for the Cannes Film Festival, a post he held two years in a row. But André Breton, Surrealism’s self-appointed gatekeeper, “despised Cocteau,” the catalog reveals—not on the quality of his work, but on the simple fact that Breton was a raging homophobe, describing himself as “completely disgusted” by male homosexuality.

The show positions Cocteau as a brave forerunner for generations of queer artists who would follow. It opens with a piece not by Cocteau, but by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The gesture, from curator and art historian Kenneth E. Silver, highlights Cocteau’s influence on younger generations (but only in this first room: the other works in this 150-plus-object show are by Cocteau or related ephemera). Made in 1991, the year that Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’s partner died, “Untitled” (Orpheus Twice) features two side-by-side full-length mirrors that recall the Orpheus myth—a long-standing motif in Cocteau’s work. While mourning and with his premature death looming, Gonzalez-Torres seemingly felt like Orpheus: separated from his lover, the twinned mirrors served as a kind of connection to Ross. Next to the mirrors, we see a clip from Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée, which also uses that metaphor of the mirror as a portal—this time, one that takes the protagonist to Hades, where Orpheus seeks to save Eurydice.

John Cage’s 1952 work 4′33″ has proven a touchstone for artists, composers, and thinkers of all kinds, spawning conceptual artworks, experimental gestures, and even an iPhone app. But even as almost everyone agrees on its importance, misunderstandings about the work proliferate.

For one, 4′33″ is sometimes affectionately known as Cage’s “silent piece,” since the work calls for its enactor to stop using their instrument for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage himself used that terminology to describe the work, then would go on to contradict it, claiming that 4′33″ was not silent.

This week’s big art-related discourse—on social media, anyway—centered around a botched interpretation of the work. In a New York Times op-ed, Columbia University professor John McWhorter claimed that he had been trying to teach his music humanities students about the Cage piece when he was interrupted by pro-Palestine protesters shouting “From the river to the sea.”

“I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building,” McWhorter wrote.

This comment spurred one X user to respond: “‘the protests are robbing my Columbia students of listening to John Cage’s 4’33, the piece of music that is explicitly designed to force you to listen to…what’s around you.’ absolutely perfect.” At the time this article was published, the tweet had 38,000 likes.

When I took my mother back to Paris for her first visit in nearly five decades, there was no question we would go to the Louvre. I was more surprised that she wanted to stand in the long line to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) for the few seconds we would get to take pictures and selfies with the famous painting.

This experience is often annoying and disappointing for tourists, with one recent analysis of 18,000 reviews deeming the Renaissance portrait “the world’s most disappointing masterpiece.”

Da Vinci’s iconic image of an almost-smiling woman is protected by bullet-proof, anti-reflective glass, along with tightly-controlled temperature and humidity settings to ensure the painting’s conservation.

In an effort to remedy this situation, the Mona Lisa may be moved to an underground chamber, according to a report in The Telegraph Tuesday.

Louvre director Laurence des Cars recently suggested the relocation of the popular artwork to a dedicated room constructed in the institution’s basement.

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