The Immersive Art Boom Needs to Stop Making Us Stand in a Giant Projection

Here is my unpopular opinion: most immersive art exhibitions are not art exhibitions. They are screensavers with ticketing departments.

You enter a dark room. A starry sky ripples across the walls. A familiar piece of classical music arrives wearing a tuxedo. Somewhere, a digital sunflower enlarges to the size of a swimming pool. Everyone takes out a phone, because apparently the soul now requires portrait mode.

The problem is not technology. The problem is scale without thought. Making an image enormous does not make it profound. A projected painting is still a painting’s cousin who moved to Los Angeles and started saying “content.” The best art asks you to look closely, to notice the strange brushstroke, the awkward hand, the tiny figure in the corner. Immersive shows often turn those details into decorative confetti.

And yet—and this is where I become a traitor to my own argument—I understand why people love them. They are generous. They do not require you to know the difference between a triptych and a tricycle. They offer a way into art through the body: walk, listen, sit, be surrounded. For someone who finds traditional museums chilly or intimidating, a room that says “come in, the ceiling is glowing” may be exactly the invitation they need.

So I am not calling for the death of the projection. I am calling for better manners. Tell us what has been changed. Show us the original work alongside the spectacle. Give us a quiet room where we can see one actual painting without it exploding into twelve thousand pixels. Let the artist’s life remain complicated instead of reducing every tragic biography to inspirational piano music.

Immersive art should be a doorway, not a dead end. If it sends people toward the real thing—toward books, galleries, museums, difficult-looking paintings, and the thrilling realization that art does not need to entertain you every second—it has done its job.

But if I leave knowing only that Van Gogh had excellent branding, the exhibition has failed. Beautifully, expensively, atmospherically failed.