The “Immersive Van Gogh” Room Is a Very Expensive Screensaver

Here is my unfashionable opinion: most immersive art exhibitions are not immersive. They are large rooms with projectors, dramatic music, and a suspicious number of visitors lying on the floor.

The formula is familiar. Take a beloved painter—usually Van Gogh, because the man provided both sunflowers and a tragic biography—blow up his paintings until the brushstrokes are the size of kitchen tables, add some floating stars, and invite the audience to “step inside the work.” The result is less a museum exhibition than a screensaver with ticketing.

And yet, people love these shows. I understand why. Traditional museums can make art feel like a test you forgot to study for. Here, nobody is asking you to know the difference between a diptych and a Dutch oven. You walk into a dark room, the walls move, the music swells, and suddenly your child is asking who painted the sad blue church. That is not nothing. Curiosity has entered the building wearing LED sneakers.

But spectacle is not the same as substance. A painting is not merely an image; it is a decision made at a particular scale, on a particular surface, by a particular person wrestling with time, money, weather, loneliness, ego, or the neighbor’s rooster. When we turn the painting into a 40-foot projection, we often lose the very thing that made it powerful: its stubborn physical presence.

The best immersive exhibitions understand this. They use light, sound, film, and space to reveal something an ordinary wall cannot. They make you notice rhythm, repetition, or the strange architecture of a painter’s mind. The worst ones simply inflate the merchandise. They take a masterpiece, remove the paint, and leave us with vibes.

My proposed fix is simple: less “feel the color,” more information. Tell us what the artist changed. Show us the rejected sketches. Let the projection break down a composition instead of merely making it shimmer. Give us one quiet minute without orchestral swelling. Trust the audience with an actual idea.

Art can be fun. It can be loud, theatrical, ridiculous, and even a little cheesy. But if I am paying grown-up money to stand inside a painting, I would like to come away with more than the urge to buy a tote bag and lie down.