On 21 August 1911, an Italian house painter named Vincenzo Peruggia walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa under his smock. She was missing for more than two years. The line to keep: before the theft she was admired, and after it she was famous. Here is the face all of Paris came to miss.

Sydney chose Jørn Utzon’s sketches in 1957, promising a building for A$7 million by 1963. Utzon resigned in 1966 and never came back. It opened in 1973, at A$102 million. The line to keep: letters to the paper called it “a Danish pastry”… and today it is the symbol of a country.

The Great Gatsby sold so slowly that in 1940, the year he died, F. Scott Fitzgerald earned $13.13 from all his books. Then the army printed about 155,000 free copies for soldiers in the Second World War. The line to keep: the audience arrived late, but it arrived.

The word was born in Munich’s art market in the 1860s and 1870s, for pictures made quickly, sold cheaply and loved easily. The line to keep: kitsch is sincere, while camp is in on the joke. And the poker-playing dogs critics laughed at now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In 1967, the German scholar Hans Robert Jauss (1921–1997) gave a lecture at the University of Konstanz that changed how critics study books. He argued that every audience meets a work with a “horizon of expectations,” everything it already believes a novel, a painting or a building should be. When a work matches that horizon, it is welcomed at once. If it stretches that horizon instead, the first audience is often confused or hostile… and a later one may call it a masterpiece. Critics call this reception theory. In other words, a work’s value is not fixed on the day it appears. Now look back at the week. Sydney in 1957 had never seen anything like Utzon’s shells, so some readers saw only a pastry. Readers who knew Fitzgerald as the voice of the Jazz Age party were puzzled by a darker, sadder book. And kitsch shows the same process running in reverse… pictures that matched every expectation sold at once, and the critics came for them later. Next time someone dismisses a new building or book, ask one question: whose horizon is it stretching?