If you want to be a great painter, perhaps you could reverse engineer what made the Mona Lisa such an important painting.

You could move to Italy. You could learn about shadows and light and technique.

The problem is that the Mona Lisa isn’t the most famous painting in the world because of all of those things. Lots of paintings have those things.

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it was stolen a hundred years ago, was missing for a year and was featured in the then brand-new medium of big newspapers and color printing.

In other words, right when the world was ready for an icon that stood for ‘famous painting’, there she was (or more accurately, wasn’t).

You can’t step in the same meme twice–the second time, the culture is different.

Making the next version of something is a completely different project than creating the conditions for the first version to happen.