Van Gogh Immersive Experience Coming to the US

“Have you ever dreamt of stepping into a painting? Now you can! Welcome to Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” — Promises from the ads have people both confused and unable to contain their excitement about the upcoming immersive van Gogh exhibits hitting major US cities in 2021.

The van Gogh Experience

In 2021, people in the United States finally get to enjoy a 360-degree experience set to music featuring the work of Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. The exhibit places visitors in the middle of large-scale moving images that are projected onto the walls, ceilings, and floors in a large gallery or warehouse space.

The digital art show features van Gogh masterpieces set to music, and takes about 60 to 75 minutes to experience in full. For the Fever/Exhibition Hub shows, VIP Access enables visitors to experience an additional virtual reality component of the exhibition, a 10-minute journey through a day in van Gogh’s life that places you in the center of his most personal paintings. (Equipment disinfected after each use.)

Tickets

Timed-entry tickets currently on sale for shows in some cities are selling out quickly. Tickets go on sale this week for six other U.S. cities.  Social distancing circles projected on the floor of the gallery give guests their own space during their visit, so ticket quantities are limited for all shows.

Different companies produced the exhibits currently on sale. Check the URLs for the tickets carefully before purchasing. (See below for more details.)

Tickets sold by FeverUp.com have a waitlist giving purchasing priority. I used it successfully for the Washington, DC sales and bought my tickets one day before they were released to the public. To check the waitlist for your city, visit https://vangoghexpo.com/

Some Confusion About the Exhibit

Several production companies competing for the same market are causing a lot of confusion for consumers. No fewer than four different companies are creating exhibits for viewers to, “immerse themselves in lush, Instagram-friendly environments created through high-resolution, glowing digital renditions of works by masters,” noted Artnet. Culturespaces, Starvox Entertainment, Exhibition Hub, and  showman-museum director Charles Venable are all producing van Gogh immersive art exhibits.

In Boston, New York, and other cities these competing exhibits with similar names have some ticket buyers disappointed. The two exhibits are very closely named: “Immersive van Gogh” versus “van Gogh: the Immersive Experience.” They are similar, but different. I’ve yet to see a comparison of the two by someone who attended both; however, the Better Business Bureau has received numerous complaints about Fever from exhibit goers who felt duped into buying the wrong tickets.

Which is Which?

In the ticket list above, the first 4 link to “Immersive van Gogh” exhibits. Those shows are produced by Starvox Entertainment. The others all link to Fever’s “van Gogh: the Immersive Experience” produced by Exhibition Hub. The URLs are a clue to which exhibit you’re purchasing tickets for.

Out of curiosity and a great love of van Gogh’s work (remember when I geeked out on his exhibit in Houston a couple of years ago?), I bought tickets to both versions of the immersive experience. In August, I’ll review each and compare them to each other.

Also, when CultureSpaces opens their New York museum in the former banking hall on Chambers Street, the grandest space in a Beaux-Arts building designed by Raymond Almirall and constructed from 1909 to 1912, I will be one of the first in line. According to the Art Newspaper, it is expected to open in 2021-2022.

Other Digital Art Museums

The digital exhibit experience became popular in Europe and Asia in recent years. L’Atelier des Lumières – Paris’s first digital museum of fine art — opened in 2018 and saw over 400,000 visitors in its first 3 months. Also in 2018, teamLab Borderless opened in Tokyo. They define the permanent space as, “a world of artworks without boundaries, a museum without a map…a group of artworks that form one borderless world. Artworks move out of rooms, communicate with other works, influence, and sometimes intermingle with each other with no boundaries.”

Seemingly propelled by technologic advancements, the millennial generation’s desired way to experience things, and more recently, by COVID, there seems to be a sudden advancement in art exhibits taking storm and the public is thirsty to experience it.

I’m no exception. I’m very excited to experience these exhibits in August. I will undoubtedly post a review then. I hope you also get to enjoy it. Let me know what you think in the comments!