“Did you hear about the new immersive Klimt show? I saw the Van Gogh show last year, and it was incredible. After these shows, who wants to go see a regular old exhibit where the pictures just hang there? These images move all around you.” So spoke a certain acquaintance who shall remain nameless, giving voice to what will undoubtedly be the conclusion of many an attendee, even those too ashamed to profess to such a sentiment openly. 

I was sceptical, but I had always had a soft spot for German and Austrian expressionism, with the Upper East Side’s Neue Galerie devoted to that movement being my favourite of New York City’s smaller museums. I figured that if I was ever going to go to one of these “immersive experiences” now popping up all over and certain to represent the wave of the future, this was likely to be as good an opportunity as any. 

“I’m shocked you want to go. Don’t you think it’s going to be like a giant screensaver?” my companion offered when I expressed my interest in getting tickets.

“Maybe, but look, we’ve never been to one of these things, and everyone loves them. I don’t put much stock in that, but I don’t want to dismiss these immersive shows without having seen at least one, so I want to keep an open mind.” 

An entirely different artist’s work had been smuggled in

She shrugged her shoulders in response, a signal just ambivalent enough to give me the go-ahead to get two $35 tickets. And so we went.

Entering the former Lower Manhattan home of the Emigrant Savings Bank at 49 Chambers Street, now pompously rechristened the “Hall des Lumières”, an event space to be dedicated to such immersive exhibitions, we waited in a short line ahead of our 3 p.m. Friday timed entry slot and proceeded to stroll in along with a thankfully modest-sized cohort of others.

Not long after we turned the corner into the darkened main hall, the spectacle began, starting with a brief wordless exposition about the breathtaking turn-of-the-20th-century space itself. We exchanged reverent whispers at the prospect of imagining filling out deposit slips in such environs rather than rushing to get cash out of our generic bank branch’s ATM whilst keeping one eye on the doings of the malodorous bum curled up by the far wall, right up against the window, as though to constitute an ironic display — a financial institution advertising abject poverty — for dismayed passersby. 

After the bit about the bank had concluded, the featured presentation began. Set to music ranging from late 19th or early 20th century German highlights from Wagner and Mahler to somewhat odder choices, such as Philip Glass, a spectacular series of Klimt and Klimt-inspired imagery unfolded all around us, spanning the four walls, the floor and the majestic square columns framing the hall. Flowers unfurled, snow fell, fingernails peeled down the length of the walls, great eyes opened and closed, and many of Klimt’s most iconic images took form and dissolved on all sides. We could watch the show from the main hall, an elevated sub-level just behind it or a separate basement space below. As the principal proceedings went on for their approximately 30-minute runtime, all without a single word of explanation, we were suddenly met with an entire extended interlude devoted to Klimt’s dazzling younger contemporary and sometime mentee, Egon Schiele. Because both of us are passionate admirers of Schiele’s work, we instantly recognized the unexpected departure from the central plot. To those familiar with them, Klimt and Schiele differ markedly, but they have their commonalities, and we wondered if those spectators whose knowledge of Klimt and Schiele was more cursory would ever realise an entirely different artist’s work had been smuggled in. 

Throughout the show, I found my head swivelling this way and that as I tried to take in as much as I could of these beautiful images taking form and dissolving, hardly ever holding still, masterpieces, a life’s work, hovering precariously in place for no more than 10 or 20 seconds before giving way. I took in, as well, the doings of the other audience members. A few Asian tourists were filming the proceedings from start to finish and, in the process, focusing primarily on the miniaturised rendition of the show on their screens. I noticed that some of the younger spectators, initially enraptured along with the rest, began to fade as the succession of images wore on and turned to fidgeting with their phones, leaving Klimt unattended.

The main event ended, and then several other shorter pieces hit the screen, some clearly intended to check the diversity box, as every contemporary production is obligated to do. We took the opportunity to check out the rest of the space. Descending into the bank’s basement, we had the transgressive pleasure of setting foot inside the vault, a stunning, alien enclosure akin to what I’d imagine as the interior of a retro-futuristic rocket ship. Near the vault, tucked away in a basement corner — sufficiently sidelined that many visitors either would never come upon it or, even if they did, would get the clear message that it was beside the point — was a paltry, cursory assemblage of text, the only bit that described who Klimt was and what the Vienna Secession movement of which he was a part was generally about. After reading it, we ventured toward the opposite corner of the basement, which contained an absurd “selfie room”, offering some Klimt-themed wallpaper for those who felt the need to memorialise and broadcast their attendance.

Immersive experiences will not drive but dilute interest in traditional art displays

And there it was, “Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion”, though, to tell the truth, I would’ve much preferred that Klimt and his gold had stood still for a spell to give the viewers who were looking for more than mere pleasant sensations some time to take it all in. A generation raised on Snapchat, TikTok and the latest Avengers flick would never know it, but, as the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky argued, one of the principal feats art achieves is the slowing down of time, getting us to linger longer on a thought, a phrase, an image or a note than we do in our everyday lives. Arts such as writing, painting, sculpture, architecture and interior design offer an additional tool in this regard: they cede control over the chronological dimension of the experience to the reader or viewer almost entirely, making it possible to stop on a word or pause before a painting and contemplate. Turning Klimt into a musical revue robs us of that pleasure and, with it, of the opportunity to engage with his work on a deeper level. Whilst the traditional art show required the viewer to move through the exhibit halls at a chosen, deliberate pace whilst engaging in the active process of aesthetic contemplation, immersive experiences turn viewers into passive spectators struck dumb by — and ever playing catch-up with — a blitzkrieg of images wiggling and prancing all around them, never adding up to a sum greater than its ephemeral parts.

Yes, yes, okay, we might say, but why is there not room in the world for variations on a theme, both a traditional Klimt exhibit and this immersive experience, just as there might be a Klimt-inspired dress design or a biopic based on his life? Indeed, for those who would hardly ever go to an ordinary exhibit, this might be as close as they get or, better yet, serve as a gateway that piques their interest in the real thing: “It’s very important, also, to open the art and the culture to a large audience … because [not everyone] go[es] to the museum, but maybe you[’re] going, [through] this kind of approach, … to discover something new, and then maybe [are] stimulated to see the real original painting in the museum. Then, I think [there] is no contradiction between this kind of experience and the museum but is complementary,” opined Gianfranco Iannuzzi, the creative director of this and similar experiences.

I cannot say whether Mr. Iannuzzi’s hopeful pronouncement is a mere cynical marketing ploy in an effort to win the allegiances of the powers-that-be in the art world or just a piece of self-deception constructed to fend off a creeping sense of having contributed to the further dumbing down and coarsening of high culture. It does not matter in the end. I have not the slightest doubt that the actual effect of this and similar immersive experiences will be not to drive but to dilute interest in the traditional slow, non-immersive experiences of art, just as television displaced interest in books in an earlier generation or the way social media has displaced most longform communication. Those who read the book might well go on to watch the movie, but though I haven’t been able to dig out any stats elucidating the issue, I very much doubt that any substantial proportion of those who watch the movie proceed to read the book. Going from a monastery to a rollercoaster is easy enough, but going in the opposite direction feels like a chore. One attempting the feat will have a sense of being frazzled, under-stimulated, unable to focus, unnerved by the eerie calm and quiet. Once our bodies and minds have gotten accustomed to a high level of stimulation, coming back down to immerse ourselves in activities requiring deep focus is often too much to ask. “Experiences” that immerse us in vision, sound and motion ironically make it harder for us to do much immersion of our own accord. Just as my acquaintance said, “After these shows, who wants to go see a regular old exhibit where the pictures just hang there?”

The additional irony of this state of affairs is that Klimt is — or should be — an accessible artist, a rare case of 20th century high culture with popular appeal. But shows like this, which appropriate and recycle a great artist’s work for the sake of the Culture Industry’s opportunistic creation of new intellectual property to own and use for shallow profiteering, make the paintings themselves less accessible, more difficult and demanding, more crusted over with a forbidding patina of antiquity. 

In his famous 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” — made yet more influential by John Berger’s incorporation of its central argument in his widely viewed and read Ways of Seeing — the Frankfurt School’s Walter Benjamin celebrated the manner in which technology making possible the free reproduction of images had given rise to new art forms such as cinema and removed that old patina (what Benjamin called the “aura”) marking old, unique originals and keeping the spectator at arm’s length. From his Marxian standpoint, Benjamin saw this revolution as liberatory, democratising art and opening up high art to mass consumption. For this reason, Benjamin argued, unlike with older art forms, in which the tastes of cultural elites and the masses often starkly diverged, with the new artform of cinema, the high art of Charlie Chaplin could simultaneously be appreciated by elites and the volk alike. 

Disposable mass culture threatens to drag its better half down into its cesspool

As subsequent history has demonstrated, Walter Benjamin was wrong. What he saw in cinema was simply the early stages of a new art form, and in the early stages of art forms — whether the earliest literature, e.g., Homer, the earliest music or cave paintings and antique marbles — there is hardly ever a divergence between high and low. The disparity between high and low taste creeps in, as that great theorist of literary influence Harold Bloom made clear time and again, because art creates a cumulative tradition. Its own history and language build upon themselves and, through fits and starts, complexify with every addition to the canon. New generations of artists, seeking inevitably to create something original, something that has not yet been done, must familiarise themselves intimately with the existing tradition in order to draw and build upon its foundation. The general public is hardly ever as intimately familiar with the canon of great works, especially as time wears on and that canon expands. As a result, with time, the works of art that the masses understand and appreciate are increasingly further and further away from what constitutes the avant-garde, the state of the art, the novel and the great. Had Benjamin lived to see the state of his beloved cinema today, he would have witnessed the formation of that same divergence between cinematic high art that only the select few see or know, and the popular middlebrow mush and big-budget blockbusters raking in the Academy Awards and the public’s cash.

What Benjamin got still more tragically wrong was the role “the aura” plays in our perception of great works of art. Shklovsky’s insight, viz., that art refreshes our world by slowing down perception and de-familiarizing us with our commonplace experience, helps us appreciate why art’s aura is actually closely allied to art’s very purposes. The aura — that halo that has us standing in awe before original masterpieces and going far and wide to visit great paintings and original scores and manuscripts — marks the best works as standing above the everyday world, as occupying a place that is particularly worthy of attention, as something special and even sacred. In our contemporary milieu in which we are surrounded by so much that is banal and trivial, it is crucial that something remains sacralised, pedestaled. 

The onslaught of disposable mass culture threatens to drag its better half down into its cesspool, tainting it by association. This is especially the case when the mass culture at issue directly draws upon and appropriates a specific work of high culture, thereby instilling in us a false sense of intimacy with the latter and trivialising that which should remain exalted. Old originals then become, as I suggested, little more than crusty and antiquated, a still, static version of their more dynamic, updated counterparts. The aura turns into a patina of rust. Moronic hooligans feel at liberty to splatter glue or foodstuffs over irreplaceable masterpieces. 

To make matters worse, the disposable new variants can displace their priceless predecessors but never replace them. Their high-octane fireworks, in pursuit of audiences with shrinking attention spans, represent a race to the bottom that the profiteers are ultimately destined to lose, as my witnessing of the younger audience members turning to their cell phones during the latter half of the Klimt show attests. Gustav Klimt’s actual work had the ability to transfix. “Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion” has only the ability to distract … and not for very long. Because it is no more than a meaningless mush of ephemeral imagery, the show fails to captivate; it is eminently forgettable. Viewers, moreover, will emerge knowing just as much or just as little about Klimt and his art as they did when they entered, but will now be armed with a false sense of having attended an art exhibit devoted to Klimt rather than a kitschy spectacle for which Klimt is just an incidental occasion.

Nor is the sadly common response of apathy, in the face of these goings-on, an option. It will not avail us to say, in essence, the masses will do what the masses will do; let them have their fun. Why should it worry us, who know better? Mass culture, by its very nature, cannot be contained. It infests all culture, high and low. Just as Roundup sprayed on the neighbour’s crops is carried far and wide by the wind and gradually infiltrates our entire food supply, the obstreperous explosions of big budget blow-em-ups at the Megaplex cannot be contained. Their shrapnel lodges in our craniums, slowly sapping our collective capacity to concentrate, lowering expectations, wounding our kids whilst they are most vulnerable to lifelong damage to their sensibilities and their attention spans. Just as surely, the proliferation of immersive experiences is certain to dim art’s lustre. Its flashy fool’s gold dulls us to the genuine glitter of Klimt and his ilk, stealing away our willingness to mine for the hard-won nuggets of the pure gold hidden from view.