Immersive Art Exhibitions: Spellbinding, or Forgettable?

The Hall des Lumières is a cathedral of light. The digital art center, which opened in September, is looking to convert New Yorkers to its brand of immersive art.

“What we really go for, is trying to reach the deep emotions of people,” said Gregoire Monnier, the director of Culturespaces, the organization that works with the sports, events and talent management company IMG to run the space. Culturespaces has eight large-scale immersive digital art centers globally, including locations in Paris, Seoul and Amsterdam.

Currently there are two principal shows running in New York: “Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion,” featuring the Austrian artist’s most recognized works, and “Destination Cosmos,” a deep dive into the solar system created with participation from NASA.

These kinds of immersive exhibitions have sprung up seemingly everywhere over the past decade or two, thanks to improvements in the quality, accessibility and affordability of digital technology. Critics generally hate the shows, but, if attendance figures are anything to go by, the paying public loves them. Museums have taken notice of the excited crowds, and now, they’re beginning to try their hands at digital showmanship.

A “Bridge Between Culture and Entertainment”

The draw of the shows is particularly clear in France, where Culturespaces operates three centers, each of which, they report, attracts from 650,000 to 1.4 million people a year. “It’s more the local public,” Mr. Monnier explained in a video interview. He added that, in New York, the organization was hoping for 500,000 visitors in the first year and 800,000 annually in the future.

The company’s model works like this: find a unique venue, create an animated show of works by a well-known master artist or a pop culture phenomenon to project onto the building’s interior, and workshop the show to ensure it is awe-inspiring and easy to digest — whether viewers are sitting, standing, lying down or even dancing.

The shows are designed to be family friendly, Mr. Monnier said, and enjoyable with or without prior knowledge of the artist, making the experience less intimidating than seeing the original paintings in a museum. There are no curator’s notes or explanatory wall texts inside the projection space, nor are there audio tours or docents to provide context; there’s just a bit of information about what you’re about to experience posted in a separate space before you go in. “It’s kind of a very interesting bridge between culture and entertainment,” Mr. Monnier added.

Culturespaces’ venues have hosted exhibitions featuring Dalí, Chagall and even the much-loved Tintin comics, among others.

These shows take place in spaces with rich past lives: In Provence, the venue had been a rock quarry, in Paris, a foundry, and in Bordeaux, a bustling World War II submarine base. In New York, the canvas for the immersive works is the former Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, a downtown landmark with vast halls, high ceilings and elaborate interiors done in a majestic Beaux-Arts style.

Culturespaces isn’t the only organization playing with the possibilities presented by immersive experiences. The international art collective teamLab’s mind-bending, multisensory and infinitely Instagrammable installations are propagating all over the world — London; Tokyo; São Paulo, Brazil — while Marc Glimcher, the president and chief executive of Pace Gallery, and Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, former president of Pace London, teamed up to start Superblue, an enterprise dedicated specifically to experiential art.

And there’s also the 85-year-old British painter David Hockney’s digital extravaganza on show in London. It’s one of the few, if not only, immersive exhibitions that a renowned living artist has had a hand in producing. The show has drawn both praise and criticism. Alastair Sooke, a critic for the The Telegraph, called it “a coup of entertainment: accessible, affecting, and, technically, executed with panache,” while Jonathan Jones for The Guardian wrote: “Without real art, this entertainment goes the same way as all the other immersive exhibitions of art icons: into the weightless, passionless dustbin of forgetting.”

Currently in New York, there’s everything from an Alice in Wonderland-themed “living gallery,” inviting people to “fall down the rabbit hole into a world of secret rose gardens, mad tea parties” to the Turkish American artist Refik Anadol’s installation at MoMA, which uses artificial intelligence to continuously generate large-scale digital artworks based on more than 200 years’ worth of art at the museum.

While some may be concerned about market oversaturation, the staff members aren’t worried. Though Culturespaces would not disclose its revenue figures, it is so confident in the longevity and impact of its Lumières projects based on the crowds they have drawn (1.4 million visitors for its Van Gogh experience in Paris alone) that they are planning to open more spaces globally.

In the next two to three years, they look to be in Hamburg, Germany, and Tokyo, and to expand to other cities in the United States. The success of exhibitions like theirs has also caught the attention of galleries and museums, which are turning to high-quality digital technology and art to draw attention to their own collections.

In an interview in Hong Kong, Leng Lin, the president of Pace Gallery Asia, ascribed the popularity of immersive exhibitions to a basic human desire to feel wonder. “The smiles, you know, the big eyes,” he said, recalling the public’s reaction to an early teamLab exhibit he and the gallery helped coordinate in Beijing.

That reaction is why more museums globally have turned to digital technology and digital art, and are willing to spend big money on it.

Museums Turn to Immersive Art

The Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China, recently acquired a futuristic art piece by the American artist Beeple at Art Basel Hong Kong, for a reported $9 million.

“He not only adopts the most cutting-edge digital art presentation, but also has a very unique and fully developed form of artistic expression,” the museum’s director Ai Lin wrote in a message. She added that Beeple’s work fits in well with the kind of pieces the museum sought to exhibit: emotive works that made people think about their relationship and connection with time, nature and our universe.

The sculpture, S.2122, looks like a large glass box that contains a futuristic building and the water and sky around it. The building’s foundation is submerged in water, which will rise every five years until, 25 years from now, the building and the people living in it are completely submerged. It’s a visual reminder of the climate crisis, and a testament to the artist’s belief that humanity will survive and adapt to the chaos.

The museum also owns a piece by Refik Anadol and has installed a 360-foot-long screen with built-in technology for a permanent exhibition on Nanjing’s history. The immersive exhibition animates a scene depicted on a Qing dynasty-era scroll: a cityscape of Nanjing over 1,000 years ago, with scholars, merchants, peddlers and other characters in the scene coming to life as museum-goers walk by.

In Switzerland, there is an entire laboratory dedicated to the development of immersive exhibitions. At the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Sarah Kenderdine, a professor of digital museology, and her team are researching the best ways to use digital technology for better curatorship, whether by encouraging museum visitors to interact with the exhibits and each other or by finding better ways for the public to access a museum’s collection.

Over the past 25 years, Ms. Kenderdine has produced immersive interactive exhibitions of all kinds. She has worked with Aborigines and the National Museum of Australia to tell the dreamtime story of the seven sisters, developed new interactive ways of accessing a trove of archival footage of 5,400 musicians playing jazz, blues and Latin music, and used digital technology to allow more people to access vital — but delicate — cultural treasures, such as the Mogao caves at Dunhuang in China.

In her work, she’s often found that a combination of human interaction and digital immersion proves most successful in engaging audiences, such as when a docent led a digital tour of the Mogao caves in real time.

“Artistic experimentation or experimentation in general is so vital,” said Ms. Kenderdine, in discussing how the “father of video art” Nam June Paik’s work in the 1970s informed the way we experience things now, and where technology might go. “Often, you see the future coming through these different lenses of art.”

But, she said, museums aren’t always doing technology right, often buying into hype. A prime example are all the VR headsets museums bought. “They’re almost useless in the museological context, because they’re antisocial, unhygienic, very difficult to operate, and they require one operator per headset per visitor,” she said.

Ms. Kenderdine is also not a fan of the shows that do nothing other than project art on walls. She called an immersive Frida Kahlo show she once saw “terribly kitsch,” in the way it distorted the original art. But she agrees with Mr. Monnier and Ms. Ai that there is appetite for more immersive art experiences.

“It’s not that it’s a bad thing to have done, because obviously the public are craving new modes of experience, and I think that’s the more important point.”

She is working with scientists to record experimental and stereographic images for an exhibition on Red Sea corals that will debut at the EPFL Pavilions in 2025.

Taking It All In

On a cold, rainy winter day earlier this year, Amanda Kwan, 35, met with her pregnant friend for a midday catch-up at the Hall des Lumières. Ms. Kwan, who is from Boston but runs an experiences consultancy in Shanghai, was in town visiting and had heard about the show from a friend.

Ms. Kwan said the experience was impactful and the graphics impressive, and she enjoyed having something a bit different to do. “It was more digestible. I felt like I could take it in at my own pace, more so than a full museum.”

“When you’re going to the Met or another type of art experience, where there’s so much going on, you’re rushing and trying to blaze through it,” Ms. Kwan added.

The two spent almost 90 minutes wandering through the exhibit, watching the sequences unfold. Her friend at one point sat down to absorb it all and appreciated being able to take it in stationary.

“We could’ve spent more time in there, but both of us were getting hungry.”