Please Stop Turning Paintings Into Theme-Park Rides

I have a modest proposal for the cultural industry: no more immersive exhibitions about famous painters until someone invents a projector that can display an actual painting without making it slowly melt across a warehouse wall.

You know the format. A dark room. Enormous projections. Classical music swelling like the moon is about to give a TED Talk. Van Gogh’s stars whirl overhead while a tasteful voice murmurs about passion, isolation, and “the human spirit.” Visitors stand inside the painting, which sounds exciting until you realize the painting has been enlarged to the size of a supermarket and you are standing in the corner where the artist probably intended a shadow.

These shows are not evil. They are often beautiful. They can introduce people to artists who might otherwise remain trapped behind intimidating museum labels and a security guard who looks personally offended by backpacks. Children love them. Grandparents love them. People who have never willingly looked at a painting for longer than eight seconds suddenly spend an hour watching color move across a wall. That matters.

But the art is frequently treated as raw material for an event, like a celebrity cameo in its own biography. The brushwork disappears. The scale becomes meaningless. A painting’s carefully arranged silence is replaced by an endless loop of swelling strings and inspirational fog. You don’t encounter the work; you enter the franchise.

My complaint is not that art should be difficult. My complaint is that it should be specific. A real painting has awkward corners, dead space, strange decisions, and details that refuse to become content. It may not “transport” you. It may simply sit there, stubbornly, while you figure out why a particular blue is making you uncomfortable.

That is the magic museums keep accidentally giving away: the chance to stand near something made by a human being who solved one tiny visual problem in a way nobody else could. No soundtrack required. No selfie tunnel. No ceiling projection of motivational adjectives.

Keep the immersive shows, by all means. Just label them honestly: Van Gogh: The Extremely Large Screensaver. Then put the actual painting nearby, under ordinary light, and let it be smaller than a building. I suspect it will win.