Submerged in Van Gogh: Would Absinthe Make the Art Grow Fonder?

Individual absorption is the order of the day at two touring spectacles devoted to the painter’s greatest hits.

Babies don’t develop stereoscopic vision for the first few months of their life; they have a hard time perceiving depth and dimensions, and therefore gravitate to swirling shapes and bright colors. They and others with similar taste will find great pleasure in our culture’s latest virally transmitted spectacles, which distill fin-de-siècle French painting into an amusement as captivating as a nursery mobile. Vincent van Gogh, his corpse moldering in Auvers-sur-Oise and his paintings out of copyright, has these past few years been dragooned into a new sort of immersive exhibition that reproduces his churning paintings of Provence as wall-filling animated projections — you may have seen them on Instagram, or on a Netflix indignity called “Emily in Paris.” The Franco-Dutch artist has always been a huge box-office draw (the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam drew 2 million visitors in 2019), but a touring exhibition of paintings takes years and costs millions, and reputable museums don’t lend their works to a for-profit enterprise. What a few entrepreneurial exhibitionists figured out is that many of us are less attached to van Gogh’s paintings than to the mythology that surrounds them. And that you can exhibit for cheap.