The Immersive Van Gogh Experience Is a Very Expensive Screensaver

I have a proposal for the next immersive Van Gogh exhibition: instead of projecting “Starry Night” onto a warehouse wall, simply hand every visitor a postcard and tell them to stare at it for ten minutes. Cost: roughly 41 dollars less.

This is not an attack on Van Gogh, who remains one of the great geniuses of making paint look like weather. His skies churn. His flowers seem to be having urgent opinions. His paintings are so physically alive that you can practically hear the brush bristles squeaking.

The problem is the “immersive experience,” a phrase that has somehow come to mean “large room, loud music, digital stars.” You enter, surrender your phone at the gift shop altar, and watch familiar paintings drift across the walls while a voiceover explains that Van Gogh was troubled but hopeful. Then “Clair de Lune” begins, because apparently every human emotion now requires a tasteful piano arrangement.

It is beautiful. That is the trap.

Beauty is doing all the work, like the friend at a group project who shows up with a color-coded spreadsheet while everyone else is eating chips. The projected paintings are enormous and glowing, but scale is not the same as insight. Seeing a sunflower the size of a swimming pool does not necessarily bring you closer to the painting. It may simply make you feel like a tiny bee at a very expensive rave.

And yet, I understand why people go. Museums can be intimidating. A traditional gallery asks you to stand quietly in front of an object and trust your own attention. The immersive show says: Come in. Sit down. We’ll make it spectacular. There is nothing wrong with wanting a friendly doorway into art.

But the doorway should lead somewhere. The best art experiences leave you more curious than satisfied. They make you want to know why a color was chosen, what a gesture means, why a painting feels unstable even when nothing is moving. A digital spectacle can do that, but only if it stops treating art like wallpaper with a soundtrack.

So enjoy the projections. Take the ridiculous selfie. Let the sunflowers loom over you like floral landlords. But afterward, find an actual Van Gogh in a museum—or look closely at a good reproduction—and spend five minutes with the paint itself. That is where the thunder is.