Immersive art shows are becoming more popular than the real thing. The technology is also being used in other industries such as healthcare and education, but it’s still unclear how long these innovations will last.
The art immersive experience is a show in which people are able to view the art through virtual reality. It is outshining the real thing because it allows people to see things that they would not be able to before.
In 2002, I was assigned to cover the inauguration of the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, which had just relocated to The Venetian, a Las Vegas hotel/casino. “Not even Bugsy Siegel would have thought of this!” said the resort’s owner, the late billionaire Sheldon Adelson, during a news conference. The gangster who created the Vegas strip was Siegel.
“Not even Sheldon Adelson would have thought of this!” I exclaim as the number of immersive art exhibitions grows. The entrepreneur, who died in January, had a knack for generating money, and his immersive performances have proven to be huge successes.
Immersive performances have “exploded in popularity over the past year” in Denver, according to 303 Magazine.
Creating works of art
This isn’t always a positive thing. Visitors are likely to forget that painting may be compelling without special effects when a macroscopic blow-up of a painting is splattered over walls, floors, and ceilings, allowing people to walk into the images. I’m thinking of the immersive exhibit “Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition” that debuted last month in an abandoned building in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Any knowledge that Michelangelo painted the whole narrative on a 65-foot high vaulted ceiling in exact proportion while laying on his back gazing upward for four years is lost in supersized images of the Creation myth.
“You can have no proper idea of what man is capable of achieving until you have seen the Sistine Chapel,” remarked Goethe, the great German poet.
Then there’s “Beyond Monet,” a 40,000-painting immersive exhibition projected over 50,000 square feet of the Metro Toronto Convention Center, including the Water Lilies series. It’s the largest immersive performance ever, according to Yahoo News, and it’s set to original music in surround sound.
Cavorting nymphs are the only thing lacking.
Say what?
According to Yahoo, Gilles Paquin, CEO of the Paquin Entertainment Group, the “Beyond Monet” event “elevated artwork to the next level.” Whoa! Isn’t it what Monet did with his water lilies, which he painted in a continuous picture that stretches around a room to surround and engulf viewers?
“To create the illusion of an infinite whole, a wave without horizon and without shore,” Monet wrote to his friend and biographer Gustave Geffroy about visualizing his garden. See? Monet has already provided the world with an immersive display that is devoid of gimmicks.
In excess
While an immersive Monet exhibition is unquestionably extravagant, one might argue that Adelson’s Guggenheim Heritage Museum, which eventually failed, suffered from a lack of extravagance. The glitzy Venetian hotel/casino that houses the museum, in my opinion, harmed all 45 easel paintings by early modernists including Picasso, Cezanne, and Van Gogh.
That’s because the museum’s entrance featured a magnificent hallway lined with gleaming faux marble pillars and statues and a vaulted ceiling adorned with gleaming fake gold leaf-framed paintings.
By the time you get to the Hermitage’s easel painting collection, they’ve become little and uninteresting.
This story’s moral. Keeping art out of Vegas is a good idea. Also, if art exhibitions continue to become more immersive with digital screens, actual-size paintings will fade into obscurity.
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Immersive art shows are a new form of entertainment that allow people to experience the world through the eyes of their favorite artists. They are outshining the real thing in popularity, but they have also been criticized for not being as good as the real thing. Reference: monet show.
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