Familiarity Breeds....Fame

Cornell Professor James Cutting wondered whether the prominence attributed to great works of art was attributable to their "intrinsic" qualities or whether there were other factors in play [bold added]:

Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality. These were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting’s students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.

Lots of exposure and fame

Of course, rising to the top is more than merely gaining exposure: the work must meet a high standard of craftsmanship, and timing and good luck play important roles. In the case of the most famous painting in the world

for most of its life, the “Mona Lisa” languished in relative obscurity. In the 1850s, Leonardo da Vinci was considered no match for giants of Renaissance art like Titian and Raphael, whose works were worth almost ten times as much as the “Mona Lisa”.

But after its theft from the Louvre in 1911 and its recovery in 1913

The French public was electrified.....Newspapers around the world repro­duced it, making it the first work of art to achieve global fame. From then on, the “Mona Lisa” came to represent Western culture itself.

Build a better mousetrap---then run commercials about it 24/7---and the world will beat a path to your door.