The Giant Van Gogh Screensaver Has Gone Too Far

Here is my unfashionable opinion: most “immersive” art experiences are not immersive. They are slideshow presentations with excellent marketing.

You enter a dark room. A projection of Starry Night crawls up the wall. The stars wobble. The music swells. Somewhere, a prerecorded voice says something about the human spirit, and suddenly everyone is expected to feel personally responsible for Vincent van Gogh’s ear.

I like Van Gogh. I like projections. I even like a dramatic soundtrack when the situation calls for one. But placing paintings on a giant wall and adding piano music does not automatically make the art deeper. It makes the art bigger. Those are different things. A billboard is bigger than a sonnet, but nobody wants to hear it recited at a traffic intersection.

The problem is not technology. Digital artists can make astonishing work—work that responds to your body, changes in real time, or turns light and sound into something genuinely strange. The problem is the museum-shaped promise that this is somehow the same as encountering a painting. It isn’t. A painting has edges. It has a surface. It has the stubborn dignity of refusing to move just because you paid for a timed entry.

Standing in front of an actual Van Gogh, you notice the paint. You notice how thickly it sits there, like the artist was trying to shove emotion through a tube. You notice the small decisions: this blue, not that blue; this crooked line; this patch where the brush nearly runs out of breath. A projection smooths all that into atmosphere. It gives you the feeling of art without requiring the mildly inconvenient experience of looking at art.

And yet—and this is where I reluctantly remove my cranky curator hat—people clearly enjoy these shows. Children run around. Couples hold hands. Someone who has never entered a museum gets excited about color. That matters. If a glowing room of sunflowers is the door through which someone discovers painting, I will not stand in the doorway shouting, “Actually, observe the impasto!”

So let the giant Van Gogh screensaver exist. Just stop calling it the future of art. It is the gateway drug, the theatrical trailer, the very expensive screensaver. Afterward, go look at a real painting. Stand close enough to see the brushstrokes. Let it be quiet. Let it refuse to entertain you for five whole minutes. That is when the magic starts.