By Julie Trébault

Move Over, Mona Lisa maps the “inequality pipeline” linking museums, publishing, and academia—and challenges the systems that shape what the world sees and reads.

Move Over, Mona Lisa: Reimagining What We Read, Look At, and Learn by Peggy Levitt. Stanford University Press, 360 pages, $18 (paperback)

For decades, museums, universities, and publishers have promised to become more global. Collections have expanded, syllabi have diversified, and the language of inclusion and decolonization has become commonplace. Yet, a relatively small handful of the same artists, writers, and scholars continue to monopolize international recognition. The foundations of cultural authority have proven far more durable than the rhetoric surrounding it.

Peggy Levitt’s Move Over, Mona Lisa: Reimagining What We Read, Look at, and Learn treats this paradox as a starting point. Building on longstanding conversations in globalization, museum studies, cultural sociology, and world literature, Levitt—a professor of sociology at Wellesley College—shifts the focus beyond representation alone. Her contribution is not simply to argue that cultural hierarchies persist, but to show how they are reproduced across organizations that are generally studied independently: Museums, publishing, translation, universities, libraries, and the art market, she argues, are interconnected pieces of a larger ecology through which cultural authority is continuously reproduced.

Walk through enough museums, browse enough college reading lists, or consider which translated novels routinely appear on bookstore shelves, and patterns begin to emerge. Similar works circulate, the same artists become canonical, and a limited number of institutions continue to determine what counts as “world culture.” Levitt asks us to stop treating those outcomes as independent phenomena.

She calls this interconnected system the “inequality pipeline.” The metaphor works because recognition accumulates. By the time a painting hangs in a major museum or a novel appears on a university syllabus, countless earlier decisions have already shaped its chances of arriving there. Access to arts education, translation, publishing, gallery representation, biennials, library classification, peer review, textbook publishing, and university hiring all influence what ultimately becomes visible. And crucially, merely looking at any one of these domains in isolation obscures how each reinforces the others.

Here, Levitt’s framework also has broader implications for artistic freedom. The inequality pipeline reminds us that artistic freedom is shaped by more than the absence of censorship or state repression. Institutional support, access to professional networks, funding decisions, and other internal factors all influence whether artists are able to sustain a public practice. In that sense, Levitt expands the conversation beyond questions of formal freedom toward the infrastructures that enable— or crucially, that constrain—cultural participation.

This is where Move Over, Mona Lisa distinguishes itself from many recent books on cultural equity. Levitt is certainly concerned with who is represented, but she also views representation as the visible expression of deeper institutional arrangements. Rather than asking simply who is missing from the canon, she asks how canons are made. Cultural authority, in her account, emerges through the cumulative effects of organizations, markets, professional networks, funding structures, and educational systems that shape which works circulate widely and which remain comparatively invisible.

The book develops this argument through a broad but substantial institutional lens. Levitt moves from museums to publishing houses, literary festivals, galleries, libraries, universities, and scholarly journals, tracing the ways they reinforce one another. What initially appears to be a series of separate case studies gradually reveals itself as a larger ecology of cultural production.

Some of the book’s strongest chapters examine places where institutional choices are often mistaken for “neutral” or purely scholarly or aesthetic judgments. The discussion of art history and comparative literature textbooks is especially effective: Through interviews with editors and analyses of widely used survey texts, Levitt demonstrates how copyright costs, market pressures, disciplinary conventions, and professional networks shape what future generations of students encounter. Here we see how canon formation, in her account, is rarely the product of explicit exclusion. More often, it emerges from routine editorial decisions that collectively and incrementally acquire extraordinary influence.

Translation receives similarly careful treatment. Statistics about the limited number of books translated into English are well-known, but Levitt is interested less in the number of translations than in the patterns they reveal. European languages continue to dominate, while many languages spoken by far larger global populations remain significantly underrepresented. Connecting this to matters of global importance, translation becomes more than a literary concern. It is one of the principal mechanisms through which cultural visibility is distributed internationally, shaped by publishers, funding bodies, translators, editors, and assumptions about readership.

Throughout the work, Levitt returns to systems as opposed to individual actors. Her concern is not only that more artists and writers from underrepresented regions should circulate internationally, but also that the pathways through which they circulate remain remarkably uneven: The organizations that publish, exhibit, translate, review, teach, and fund cultural work become as important as the work itself.

The comparative framework built around Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea allows Levitt to test this argument across three very different cultural landscapes. Rather than comparing traditional Western centers with countries on the margins of global culture, she focuses on societies occupying distinct and dynamic positions within contemporary cultural exchange. Argentina combines a robust literary tradition with strong regional publishing networks. Lebanon has sustained remarkable artistic and intellectual activity despite prolonged political and economic instability. South Korea has become one of the world’s most visible exporters of culture within a single generation.

These case studies complicate familiar narratives about globalization. Cultural authority is no longer concentrated exclusively in Europe and North America, yet neither has it been redistributed  evenly. New centers have emerged without displacing older ones, creating overlapping rather than competing geographies of influence. Levitt’s attention to regional publishing, South-South exchange, diasporic networks, and alternative forms of cultural cooperation offers a welcome corrective to outdated accounts that continue, sometimes tacitly, to describe globalization primarily as a one-directional flow from Western capitals.

At the same time, the comparison raises considerations about the reach of the book’s central framework. Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea occupy very different historical, political, and economic positions. South Korea’s emergence as a global cultural power is closely tied to sustained state investment and export-oriented cultural industries. Lebanon’s artistic networks have been shaped by migration, diaspora, and repeated political crises. Argentina’s publishing ecosystem reflects a long-established regional literary sphere with its own institutional history. The comparison is most persuasive when Levitt uses these differences to demonstrate that there is no single route toward international visibility. It invites slight pushback when the three cases are expected to sustain the same explanatory model. But ultimately, they function persuasively as parallel illustrations of the broader argument.

Author Peggy Levitt. Photo: Wellesley College

A similar question arises from the book’s central concept. The considerable strength of the “inequality pipeline” lies in its ability to connect fields that are often studied separately. The question is not whether these worlds influence one another—they clearly do—but whether they can all be approached through the same conceptual model. While museums, scholarly journals, commercial publishing, and translation, to name a few, may respond to overlapping incentives and forms of authority, there are certainly major differences between them. While Levitt clearly demonstrates that they are connected, determining whether they operate according to comparable institutional logics is a question that some readers may wish to dwell on further.

The book becomes more openly normative in its second half, where Levitt turns from diagnostics to a vision of institutional change. Here she introduces a useful distinction between what she calls “soft reform”—broadening participation within existing institutions—and more structural forms of change that seek to reorganize or, in some cases, bypass them altogether. In some ways, the framework is not dissimilar from “assimilationalist” and “liberationist” ideas of social progress, the latter of which envisions new, alternative infrastructures. Such meaningful changes are among those that readers are invited to imagine, as Levitt considers strategies of refusal, regional autonomy, and parallel institutions operating alongside established cultural centers.

One of the book’s many virtues is that it refuses to collapse these approaches into a single political program. Levitt is careful to distinguish between expanding existing institutions and replacing them altogether, evidencing this in a repeated, but worthwhile acknowledgement that institutional change creates new tensions and new exclusions.

Yet this openness may also expose one of the book’s central tensions. “Decentering” gradually comes to encompass a remarkably wide range of strategies: incremental reform, structural redesign, regional circulation, South-South collaboration, refusal, and parallel institutions. Each reflects a different understanding of how cultural authority changes. As a result, decentering sometimes functions more as an umbrella for diverse institutional approaches than as a sharply defined analytical concept.

The book’s structure reflects this same commitment to pluralism. Letters, memoranda, autobiographical reflections, and invited “Talk Back” essays interrupt the conventional scholarly voice. The effect is uneven, but purposefully so. At their best, these interventions strongly reinforce Levitt’s commitment to collaborative and diverse forms of knowledge production.

Perhaps the book’s most compelling gesture is that Levitt places herself within the system she critiques. She writes candidly about the advantages of working in elite American institutions, publishing in English, and benefiting from professional networks that have shaped her own career. Rather than claiming a position outside the inequality pipeline, she asks what responsibilities accompany privilege within it. The title’s injunction applies to the author as much as to the institutions she studies.

As Levitt writes, the goal is “not to remove the Mona Lisa from the walls of the Louvre but to move her over so there is more room for other artworks.” That sentence captures the spirit of the book. It is less interested in replacing one canon with another than in examining the systems that determine how canons are formed.

By the book’s conclusion, the Mona Lisa herself has become almost incidental. Levitt’s real subject is not the canon but the systems that give life to it. Museums, publishers, translators, universities, libraries, reviewers, and funding bodies emerge as parts of a shared ecology through which cultural authority is assembled and maintained. Whether readers ultimately agree with every aspect of her vision for decentering, Move Over, Mona Lisa makes it difficult to look at an exhibition, a syllabus, or a bookshelf as though it simply reflects artistic merit. Instead, it requires us to critically appraise the histories, organizations, and accumulated decisions that made those arrangements appear natural in the first place.

Julie Trébault
– Executive Director, ARC – Artists at Risk Connection