There are nearly 40 Impressionist-ish installations across the US, thanks to Emily in Paris. Do the exhibitions live up to the hype?
Picture yourself in Arles, where the Rhône meets the Côte d’Azur in France, a flâneur taking in the bustling boutiques that line the road to the Roman amphitheatre or the ancient baths built by Constantine along the river. Imagine the softness of the sun as it falls in Provence. The place where Vincent Van Gogh found abundant light and temporary respite, a wanderer among the sunflowers.
Now place yourself in Washington DC, inside a big box outlet, a former Save a Lot, where groceries were once tagged and bagged near the Amtrak train yards. There are none of the flowers or cafés that marked Van Gogh’s years in France, but blazing projectors streaming images of his paintings across every square foot of surface area, as classical music piped in over loudspeakers completes the sense of aerosolised serenity.
A stroll in Arles is a distant dream for most. But the second- or third- or fourth- or fifth-closest almost-approximation is near at hand, thanks to the many competing immersive Van Gogh-themed light displays now happening seemingly everywhere all at once.
Ever since the fizzy Netflix rom-com Emily in Paris featured a scene of its eponymous heroine engaging a Starry Night light show last October, demand has soared among pandemic-addled audiences for the same experience. At least five companies — including, controversially, one major museum — have stepped up with immersive exhibits based on the life and work of the famous Dutch painter. Nearly 40 different Van Gogh rooms have opened (or will soon) across the US so far.
The phenomenon may not wind down until every man, woman and child in the US has been inundated by very large pictures of very many much smaller pictures.
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Pandemic era success
Big Van Gogh has emerged as a multi-million-dollar live event opportunity, perhaps one of the true entertainment industry success stories of the pandemic era. New players rushed to elbow their way into the few remaining cities that didn’t have a Van Gogh planned this year, as established Impressionism impresarios look ahead to the next big splash. And while some consumers have complained about copycats in cities such as Boston and New York, where duelling Van Gogh rooms have gone head-to-head, the producers of these shows have nevertheless sold millions of tickets, with prices ranging from US$20 ($26.89) to US$70 or more a pop.
“We just passed 3.2 million tickets sold, which, as I understand it, makes it the most successful attraction in the world on Ticketmaster,” says Corey Ross, president of Toronto-based Lighthouse Immersive and one of the producers behind Immersive Van Gogh, which has opened exhibits in New York, San Francisco, Houston and 16 other cities in the U.S. (plus Toronto and Dubai).
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Immersive Van Gogh is not responsible for the show that opened in Washington DC in August. That was Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, which has also set up shop in New York, Houston and other cities. Not to be confused with Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition, coming soon to Seattle and Boston, or Van Gogh Alive, the version on view in Denver and Ind anapolis and coming soon to Kansas City, Missouri. Got that?
Cavernous walk-through displays of Van Gogh and other painters are such attractive propositions that one museum — Newfields, formerly the Indianapolis Museum of Art — removed an entire floor of artworks from its museum building to establish its own immersive theatre, The Lume. Comprising 150 digital projectors covering 30,000 square feet of former gallery space, this platform for spectacles now permanently occupies the fourth floor of the museum building. For Indianapolis, the Instagram facsimile has overtaken the Impressionist artefact.
Keep it familiar
Like so many impasto brush strokes, all these immersive art-themed light shows converge to form a portrait of a nation eager to get out of the house, while not venturing too far from the safe embrace of streaming television. The global pandemic and America’s most cringeworthy fictional expat conspired to bring us a sort of holographic tour by one the world’s most comforting posters designers. Immersive Ted Lasso (based on that other streaming TV series about an American football coach who is hired to manage a British soccer team) can’t be far off.
At the Washington DC exhibit, the show kicks off with a timeline of Van Gogh’s life, displays about his career and still projections of his artworks. A booming overhead voice reads treacly quotations attributed to the artist (“Normality is a paved road; it’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it” — sigh).
Following the immersive spectacle, which runs to maybe an hour’s worth of animation set to a classical soundtrack, the show winds down with a drawing room and a virtual-reality (VR) headset. I skipped the adult colouring-book exercise, but the VR experience worked for me as a sort of first-person painter: If it had offered me a broadsword or grenade launcher, I could have platinumed Van Gogh’s time in Arles.
The exhibit I visited at Newfields in Indianapolis offered few of the same scene-setting details about Van Gogh’s life and more romanticisation of his mental-health disorders. Here, the cloying quotations take up entire walls. (“In an artist’s life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing”).
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The immersive projections offer less-noticeable animation, which might disappoint viewers hoping to LARP the scene from Emily in Paris. Surprising me, the exhibit concluded with a gallery featuring three actual Impressionist paintings. But it’s a trick! Only one of the artworks is by Van Gogh; the other two paintings are simply yellow.
Emily in Paris Photo: Stephanie Branch/Netflix
Surprising no one, gift shops chock-a-block with trinkets modelled after the one-eared Dutchman’s artworks capped off the experience at both locations.
Impressionism lovers could be forgiven for confusing all these Van Gogh venues. Permanent and pop-up events competing for pandemic views have led to some confusion — perhaps by design, since viewers are chasing a very specific experience and producers are chasing their very specific dollars.
In Boston, for example, a long-running events calendar site called Secret Boston is promoting Imagine Van Gogh while a newer group, Secret Media Boston, is behind Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, leading the former company and its customers to cry foul.
Neither exhibit has opened yet. The latter was supposed to debut on Sept 2, but abruptly postponed its launch 48 hours beforehand. The company only just lifted the lid on its location, the Strand Theater in Dorchester, when it offered a new opening date of Sept 29 — which will still give it the first-mover advantage over the second Van Gogh room opening in December (As long as guests don’t feel too salty over the last-minute hitches, in which case both shows might suffer).
Preparation time
All of these companies are working from the same source material — the same Starry Night, the same Sunflowers — that is, Van Gogh’s instantly recognisable, incredibly valuable and, above all, freely available intellectual property. His work falls in the public domain, so the only costs for using his pictures are licensing fees that producers pay museums or photographers for the use of high-resolution images. A scan of the marketing campaigns suggests there aren’t great incentives for companies to distinguish their Van Gogh party from the one happening across town, the same way there aren’t great incentives to set up the scarier haunted house in October. The key thing is to get to ground with ticket sales first.
Consumers have even dinged some Van Gogh exhibits for straying too far from expectations set by Emily’s Netflix romp through The Starry Night. In New York, people lodged dozens of complaints against Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience for not quite providing the experience as advertised on streaming television, according to the Better Business Bureau.
For his part, Mario Iacampo, the CEO of Brussels-based Exhibition Hub, which in partnership with the Madrid-based company Fever brought Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience to 10 different US cities (plus others abroad), says that the totality of the enterprise distinguishes his product. He refers to the biographical and historical displays, such as those featured in the Washington DC venture, as offerings that make his show more substantive. Viewers will come away with some knowledge about Van Gogh’s interest in Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking, for example. “We spent a lot of time preparing the public for what they’re going to see in the immersive,” he says.
Ross, with Immersive Van Gogh, points to the animation work by Massimiliano Siccardi as the engine driving Van Gogh-mania in America. This version also includes set design by David Korins, the Emmy Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated designer behind Hamilton, as well as novel soundtrack contributions by artists such as Édith Piaf and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. “Most folks are doing much cheaper productions, which in my mind, you certainly see reflected in the art,” Ross says.
Animation and extras aside, exhibitors describe roughly similar costs for bringing Van Gogh to the States. This means turning former industrial or retail spaces into public halls appropriate for ticketed gatherings. Iacampo says it costs about US$1 million to set up a Van Gogh pop-up in a US city.
Ross says that costs for their spaces — many of which will serve as permanent homes for future spectacles — range from US$4 million to US$15 million. These aren’t small undertakings: Laid end-to-end, the fibre optic cables for the New York show at Pier 36 would stretch from the Statue of Liberty to the top of Manhattan. Immersive Van Gogh makes Ross’s group the largest buyer of Panasonic projectors in the world.
“It’s a new genre,” Ross says. “It’s not specifically an art exhibition as you would experience it in a museum, with the curatorial support that a museum would have.”
That makes the Indianapolis exhibit unique, since the Newfields museum actually took art down in order to put its digital theatre up. The Lume replaced the museum’s fourth-floor contemporary art galleries, where works by the likes of Sam Gilliam, Erwin Wurm and Michelle Grabner — artists who might hope to one day achieve the same household-name status as Van Gogh — were previously hung so optimistically.
In other cities, non-profit museums aren’t rushing to compete with these for-profit entities to recreate Emily in Paris. In one sense, that’s not too surprising, since art museums thrive by dedicating themselves to the mission of furthering the appreciation of the art collections that have been entrusted into their care over decades and centuries (The Indianapolis Museum of Art itself was established in 1883).
Otherwise, these temples of art history would have long since lapsed into more popular or profitable pursuits: Movie theatres, shopping malls and even parking lots.
The next blockbuster
Yet, the siren song of the spectacle is alluring to even the best museums. The Museum of Modern Art expanded the notion of what a blockbuster art show could be with the Rain Room — a room that rained — in 2013. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution’s national museum of modern art, welcomed one million visitors for the first time ever when it hosted Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkin-flavoured, polka-dotted Infinity Mirrors in 2017.
Contemporary artists have turned out major museum hits with spiralling chutes, sunken ball pits and exploding Chevrolets. Those shows all engaged new ideas and makers, at least; with its Van Gogh spectacle, Newfields is recycling age-old intellectual property to which it has very little claim for a guaranteed hit maker.
Newfields — whose last director, Charles L. Venable resigned in February after the museum posted a job listing noting the importance of maintaining its “traditional, core, white art audience” — has in recent years also emphasised decorative spectacles over traditional shows. High-dollar ticketed displays such as Winterlights have taken precedence over collection-driven exhibits as the museum has shed curators and staff.
It might be hard for traditional art museums to resist the temptation of hosting rotating digital displays that rake in the dollars over the slower work of cultivating a community’s love of analogue painting. Impressionist-ish installations are at least adjacent to what museums do, a struggling museum might argue, while selling Starry Night umbrellas is a core gift-shop function. Private-sector spectacles, otherwise harmless fun, represent a threat to museums that have lost their way.
Museums that do follow down this path, however, will find that it’s well travelled. Companies pushing Van Gogh are already lining up other Impressionist painters to take his place. Immersive Klimt is coming. So is Monet by the Water, Beyond Monet and Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience.
“New guys seem to arrive all the time,” Ross says. — Bloomberg
