New ‘immersive’ art experiences try to improve on the classics
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, it’s Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. This is lesson number 441, which means JR has uploaded the full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/441.
Coming up today: Have you heard of the “immersive” Van Gogh experiences? These are the multi-sensory exhibits that project images of Van Gogh paintings all around you. There are several of them touring the world and they’ve sold millions of tickets. But they’re also a little bit controversial. That’s today’s topic. In the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you how to use the English phrase, “breathe new life into.” The video lesson online is about how to describe similarities. And we have a song of the week, thanks to JR. Let’s get started.
Immersive experiences based on Van Gogh paintings
In his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh created over 900 paintings, the vast majority in a span of just ten years, from age 27 until he died at age 37 in 1890. His work during that time ranks as one of history’s most impressive bursts of creative productivity. Today, his works are in the public domain, meaning that no private individual owns the rights to the images.
No fewer than six competing “immersive” experiences are trying to breathe new life into the works of the classic Dutch painter. These experiences are all different, but they have a few things in common. They’re usually located in big exhibition spaces with large blank walls. They feature animated projections of Van Gogh paintings or, more commonly, adaptations of Van Gogh paintings. There are places to sit and stand; you can also sit on the floor. They’re designed to be multi-sensory experiences: they invite you to observe the images above you, below you, and all around you. There’s usually also a soundtrack that goes along with it.
These exhibits are not in museums, but they’re in exhibition halls or theaters that can be adapted to the format. The spaces need to be completely dark and offer big blank walls all around for the projections. And the exhibits are often temporary: the one in Chicago was here for just a few months; the exhibit in Boston was at a pop-up space in a former furniture store.
One of the most popular exhibits of this new kind is called “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” and it was created by a private company called Exhibition Hub. Mario Iacampo is the CEO of Exhibition Hub and he says that his creation is both an exhibit and an experience. It allows people to experience Van Gogh’s art in a new, modern, and immersive way.
And best of all, he says, it’s accessible. A lot of young people are turned off by museums, since they’re formal, quiet, and appear exclusive. So the new exhibitions are a perfect way to bring history’s best works of art to the Instagram generation. Just walk in and enjoy it; you don’t have to know anything about art history to enjoy the show.
And even for art lovers, the exhibits are another way of experiencing the famous imagery they’ve been familiar with for so long. It’s common for people to say that the exhibits make you feel like you’re in a painting, rather than just viewing it.
As you might expect, though, not everyone is a fan. A reviewer at the Boston Globe newspaper called one exhibition a “cynical cash grab.” A critic for the New York Times called it “sloppy” and said it left her “numb”…and not in a good way. The Washington Post called one of them “unabashedly commercial.” The director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art derisively called it “entertainment,” not art.
Behind much of the criticism is the idea that people today don’t want to think or have real experiences or connect with a painting; they just want another over-stimulated electronic experience. For example, critics say the exhibits don’t let you look at a painting and think about what you see. The experiences are just visual montages where the images flash before you and disappear in seconds. In The Immersive Experience, for example, images of paintings appear on the walls and floors, transform a little, and then morph into something else. The whole show lasts 35 minutes; any one image is only displayed for a short period of time.
And because of the format, what you see isn’t even the original; it’s the “immersive” artist’s electronic interpretation of the image. The famous painting Starry Night slowly appears from a dark canvas, until you’re surrounded by imagery based on the painting; as it fades away, you see animated shooting stars.
All this has critics saying that visitors to these exhibits aren’t experiencing “Van Gogh” in any real sense; they’re just experiencing more computer animation—not something that’s in short supply.
But you can’t deny that they’re popular. The “Immersive Experience” show has sold over 3.5 million tickets in over a dozen cities, and sometimes they’re more popular than museums themselves. In Dallas, for example, the Immersive Van Gogh show sold over 100,000 tickets in a brief stay. The Dallas Museum of Art only welcomes 300,000 visitors in a whole year, and they have real Van Gogh paintings in their collection.
It’s not just Van Gogh that’s getting the immersive treatment. Exhibition Hub also produces immersive shows featuring images from Claude Monet, Banksy, and the Austrian painter Gustav Klimpt. The next show coming to Chicago is Frida Kahlo.
What it’s like
There is advertising for Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience all over Chicago. And I had absolutely zero interest in seeing it, until I read how popular it was around the world. And I thought, okay, I should go see it and tell all of you about it. So I brought JR along with me to see the exhibition here in Chicago…and I’ll tell you all about what he and I thought next week.
If you’re fans of the Netflix show “Emily in Paris,” Emily visits an immersive Van Gogh experience in episode 5 of season 1.
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