The Immersive Van Gogh Experience Needs to Sit Down

We need to have a talk about immersive art exhibitions, specifically the kind where Van Gogh’s Starry Night swells across a warehouse wall while piano music announces that feelings are happening.

My position is simple: most of these shows are glorified screensavers with excellent lighting. They take paintings built from nervous brushstrokes, strange proportions, and actual human misery, then flatten them into a giant screensaver that says, “Please photograph your emotional response.” The sunflowers become wallpaper. The brushwork becomes wallpaper with a ticket price.

And yet—annoyingly—I do not hate them.

Here is the thing museums sometimes forget: a lot of people are intimidated by art. They believe they need to know the difference between Impressionism and Expressionism before they are allowed to stand in front of a painting. They see a label with six paragraphs and immediately develop the posture of someone waiting for a dentist.

The projection show removes the velvet rope between “art person” and “person who came because their sister bought four tickets.” It makes the image physically unavoidable. A child can chase a painted moon across the floor. Someone who has never entered a gallery can suddenly notice that Van Gogh’s sky is not blue so much as actively vibrating. That is not the same as encountering the original work, but it is an encounter. We should stop pretending the first door has to be the best door.

My complaint is not that these exhibitions are accessible. My complaint is that they keep confusing scale with meaning. Making a painting enormous does not make it deeper. A 40-foot sad cypress is still a sad cypress, just with more opportunities for a stranger to walk in front of it while filming.

The best immersive exhibitions would use projection as an invitation, not a replacement. Show us the painting moving, then show us the painting itself. Let us see the raw canvas, the awkward edge, the evidence of the artist’s hand. Give us the spectacle, but also give us the thing the spectacle is spectacularizing.

So go, if you want. Enjoy the swirling stars. Take the ridiculous photo. Let the giant yellow blossoms rearrange your brain for twelve minutes. Then find the nearest museum, stand in front of one actual painting, and stay there until it stops behaving like a screensaver.