Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience - art appreciation or sensationalisation?

July 4, 2023

⚠ Attention Art Lovers ⚠
Van Gogh is going on a world tour.

After prosperously maintaining commendable success in Europe and North America, with several mainstay residencies in major cities such as London, Milan, and New York (https://vangoghexpo.com/); the illustrious artist is still making headlines 130+ years after his passing.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), the 19th-century Dutch Post-Impressionist painter (who needs no introduction) has a name, an image, and a reputation that is far-reaching and bewildering in effect. With several masterpieces under his belt, such as the instantaneously recognizable Starry Night (1889) and a whole art museum building dedicated to him in Museumplein, Amsterdam – Van Gogh is effectively the quintessential poster child for the ‘Tortured Artist’ trope.

Known for having suffered a tumultuous life, plagued by poverty whilst battling a mental illness – against all odds, it seems, that the painter has still managed to produce some of the most emotionally arresting images seen in art history. The narrative and intrigue that surrounds the Vincent van Gogh, therefore makes him the perfect candidate for an art experience installation that is centered around the figure of a ‘genius’.

The inaugural ‘Van Gogh, La Nuit Etoilée’, first presented at L’Atelier des Lumiéries back in 2019, was conceived and put together by a team of ambitious digital artists: Massimiliano Siccardi, Gianfranco Iannuzzi, and Renato Gatto.

Merging disciplinary arts and techniques with technology, a new type of artistic display and genre was developed with the ‘Immersive Experience’ — and the phenomenon simply exploded from there … Today, it even has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Gogh_immersive_experience.

Adapted to cater to each venue location that it is exhibited in, the world-famous and award-winning ‘Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience’ features digital copies / images of artworks spanning the dominant artist’s expansive repertoire being projected onto every surface (walls, floors, and ceiling) of a vast room. There are supplementary showcases that accompany the main event — educational devices that cover the artist’s life and provide some sense of context to the visual stimuli. Yet, it is undoubtable that most visitors are primarily interested in the spectacle promised of ‘stepping into’ the mesmerising world of a Van Gogh painting.

Regularly booked out for weeks to months in advance, and organized by limited timed entries, the for-profit event is currently being shown, for the first time ever, in Southeast Asia — finding its temporary home in Singapore’s Resort World Sentosa. (https://vangoghexpo.com/singapore/)

With tickets priced from S$26.00 (for locals) to S$35.00 (for tourists) per head, attendance is expectantly high – even, and perhaps contentiously, surpassing numbers that local museums / galleries receive.

Marketed as an ‘artistic encounter’ that ‘reinvents the concept of museums’, the animated slideshow-esque montage presentation of these ‘frameless’ works of art introduces the discourse which surrounds the recent changes that are being seen in the ways people experience art.

Further accompanied by an orchestral music set / audio soundtrack, the exhibit installation is intentionally themed as such to engulf its audiences sensorily and transport them into a world that promises a more intimate art experience. The resulting potent thematic visual and musical production traces Van Gogh’s life and presents the artist with an intensity that feels dramatised for the sake of exhibition and spectacle.

Although these immersive exhibitions are arguably more in tune with the current era of social media (and being online) and undoubtedly lucrative in terms of their metric success– to me, it feels quite evident that these events have moved on from being an innovative new way of presenting art integrating with technology to an audience where such advancements are very relevant to something that feel empty, void, and just like another fad trend that would dissipate once its novelty wore off.

‘Step into an artistic reality’; ‘Rediscover art’ — these are the taglines used by the organizers in their advertising campaigns across multiple platforms. The overwhelming emphasis is being laid on the exhibition being divergent from conventional / traditional art viewing, which might be intimidating. Bookended by gift shops selling a plethora of merchandising with cheap reproductions of the artwork, these immersive exhibitions heavily rely on the digital space for their appeal. The certainty that visitors would post and share images of themselves online, thus generating ‘authentic’ and ‘organic’ content that subtly promotes the event while at the same time presenting the visitor as an avid art appreciator. All this proves that many people are interested in engaging more deeply with art, but are these immersive experiences truly offering a productive alternative to art appreciation ?

While many critics from the art sphere are quick to offer their two cents on the seemingly passive act of viewing these texture-less projections of master paintings, which are essentially light images on surfaces animated as though they were ‘brought to life’ and incomparable to the experience of actively engaging with the actual artwork in all of its vibrancy and physicality. One cannot dismiss the fact that these immersive experiences, despite how commercialized they seem, are bridging and addressing a gap that bars people from interacting with art, which is the barrier to entry.

As Benjamin Walter foresaw in his 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, “the photographic image, exhibition value, …, shows its superiority to cult value.” When a work of art is separated from its original state and reproduced for the sake of exhibition and accessibility /what are we valuing in these instances — Art or the spectacle of it ?