The Immersive Van Gogh Industrial Complex Needs to Go Outside

We need to talk about immersive art exhibits, specifically the endless parade of projected Van Gogh experiences that turn a museum visit into a soft-lit screensaver convention.

Here is my position: they are not evil. They are not even always bad. But they are wildly oversold. A room where “Starry Night” ripples across the walls while a sad piano plays can be moving. So can a commercial for a luxury car, if you are tired enough.

The problem is that these shows keep borrowing the language of art while quietly replacing the art with atmosphere. You do not see a painting; you enter a brand-approved mood. The brushstrokes become wallpaper. The scale becomes a gimmick. Van Gogh’s furious, peculiar decisions—his warped perspective, his chunky paint, his stars that look less like celestial objects than emotional weather—get flattened into a blue-and-yellow screensaver that says, essentially, “Feel something now.”

And yes, art can be an experience. Paintings have always been theatrical. Cathedrals understood lighting. Baroque artists knew a little drama never hurt. But the drama should lead us back to the work, not distract us from the fact that there is no work in the room. Immersive Van Gogh is the cultural equivalent of putting a book cover on every wall and calling it a library.

What bothers me most is the bait-and-switch. These exhibitions often promise access: come understand the artist, come step inside his world. But Van Gogh’s world was not a glowing tunnel of sunflowers accompanied by a swelling soundtrack. It was also letters, failures, arguments, cheap paint, bad health, and an astonishingly stubborn attention to ordinary things. The actual paintings are stranger and less immediately flattering than the projection. They ask you to look. The projection asks you to pose.

Still, I will defend one thing: people are allowed to enjoy them. If a moving wall of sunflowers gets someone curious enough to seek out the real paintings, wonderful. Every serious art lover began somewhere, and nobody is born knowing how to stand in front of a canvas without checking the gift shop.

But let us call these shows what they are: multimedia entertainment inspired by famous art. That is a perfectly respectable category. It might even be fun. The cultural crime is pretending that a 40-foot animation of “The Bedroom” is the bedroom. It is not. It is the screensaver wearing Van Gogh’s hat.