The Immersive Van Gogh Industrial Complex Must Be Stopped

I am begging the art world to stop putting Vincent van Gogh on a giant screen and calling it an experience.

You know the setup: a dark room, “Starry Night” dissolving across the walls, a piano tinkling like it has just received devastating news, and a voiceover explaining that Vincent was sad but also very passionate. The stars swirl. The sunflowers bloom. Everyone films the ceiling. Somewhere, a gift-shop employee watches another $42 mug leave the building.

These exhibitions are not evil. They are simply the art-world equivalent of a smoothie bowl: colorful, photogenic, vaguely nourishing, and somehow priced like a minor medical procedure.

My objection is not that people enjoy them. Enjoyment is allowed! Please enjoy things recklessly. My objection is the sales pitch that this is a deeper way to encounter painting. It is not. It is a screensaver with surround sound.

A painting is not just an image waiting to become wallpaper. Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is a small, physical object with a surface, a thickness, and a particular amount of blue paint occupying a particular amount of space. Your eye moves across it because the paint gives it somewhere to go. A projection removes all that stubborn material reality and replaces it with motion graphics. The brushstrokes become special effects. The painting is no longer saying, “Look closely.” It is shouting, “Look over here! Now over here! Please take a picture!”

And yet — irritatingly — these shows work. They get people through doors who might not otherwise enter a museum. A child who sees a projected field of sunflowers may someday want to see an actual one, hanging quietly behind glass, where it cannot explode into golden particles on cue. That matters. The gateway drug is still a gateway.

So here is my compromise: call it what it is. Don’t pretend the projection is a substitute for art. Call it “Van Gogh: The Extremely Large Moving Screensaver,” charge a little less, turn down the inspirational cello, and put a real painting nearby. Let visitors experience both the sugar rush and the meal.

Art can be immersive without becoming an amusement-park ride. Sometimes the most radical special effect is standing still long enough to notice that a painted sky is made of paint.