Please Stop Calling a Projection on a Wall “Immersive Van Gogh”

I have a modest proposal for the booming projection-show industry: if the walls are covered in moving images of famous paintings, please stop calling the experience “immersive.” Call it what it is: a very expensive screensaver with excellent lighting.

This is not an attack on Van Gogh. Van Gogh remains Van Gogh: brilliant, strange, tender, and capable of making a cypress tree look like it has urgent personal news. The problem is the promise. “Immersive” suggests that we are entering the artist’s mind, or at least getting close enough to smell the turpentine. What we are usually entering is a dark room with beanbags, a soundtrack that believes every brushstroke is a major life event, and a projection of Starry Night slowly drifting across the floor.

There is nothing wrong with spectacle. Art has always loved spectacle. Cathedrals, theater curtains, fireworks, enormous marble staircases—human beings have been making things bigger than necessary since the first person decided a doorway needed a stone lion. A projection show can introduce people to an artist. It can make a child curious. It can give someone who has never felt comfortable in a museum a surprisingly lovely afternoon. Those are real victories.

But a painting is not just an image. It is a physical object with a surface, a size, a history, and a stubborn refusal to move when the soundtrack reaches its emotional climax. Standing in front of an actual painting means negotiating with it. You notice the awkward corner, the lumpy paint, the places where the artist changed their mind. A projection smooths all that away and replaces it with cinematic confidence. Van Gogh becomes less a complicated human being than the patron saint of inspirational wall décor.

So go to the projection show. Wear something that looks good in blue light. Let the giant sunflowers bloom across your sneakers. But afterward, find a real painting—any real painting—and look at it for five uninterrupted minutes. No narration. No orchestral swell. No animated stars. Just you and the object, quietly refusing to perform.