Where Have All the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibits “Van Gone”?
Consumers Say: Immersive Van No
In March of 2021, I counted as many as six different projection-based Immersive Van Gogh exhibits touring the United States and other countries.
Their popularity at the time was likely spurred by a combination of: a pent-up need to get out of the house (a la “revenge travel”); a social media ad campaign bombardment if you lived in one of the target cities; an immersive Van Gogh exhibit appearing on the popular Netflix show, Emily in Paris, in 2019; and the attractive investment to throughput ratio (one of the companies claims their Van Gogh exhibit is “extremely cost-effective to install and operate” on their site).
But which one was the “real one”? And what has become of those six companies now, over three years later?
1. The exhibit “Van Gogh, La Nuit Etoilée” was shown at L’Atelier des Lumieres in Paris. This version was created by Culturespaces and was featured on Emily in Paris. It opened in 2019 and has reportedly sold millions of tickets.
Currently L’Atelier des Lumieres is still open in Paris and Culturespaces has several different immersive art sites listed on their web site: 3 in France, 1 in NYC, 1 in Amsterdam, 1 in Germany, 2 in South Korea.
However, their NYC location has pivoted away from doing public events.
2. The “Immersive Van Gogh Exhibition” was by Lighthouse. Note: Massimiliano Siccardi & Luca Longobardi both worked on “Van Gogh, La Nuit Etoilée” so the show markets itself as “from creators of the blockbuster show in Paris.”
Lighthouse Immersive filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in Delaware in the summer of 2023. It brought pop-ups of the “Immersive Van Gogh Exhibition” to 22 different cities in the US and is currently touring a Disney Animation immersive experience in six cities worldwide.
Their “Immersive Van Gogh Exhibition” is still running in Las Vegas and Chicago.
3. “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” was being put on by Exhibition Hub and powered by Fever as their ticketing platform. Fever also became embroiled in a series of complaints to the Better Business Bureau for their New York City pop up, from consumers who had assumed they were buying tickets to the exhibit put on by Lighthouse.
“Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” has run in 31 cities worldwide and continues to run in 9 different cities around the world including London, Seoul, and Atlanta.
4. “Van Gogh Alive” was created by the Australian-based Grande Experiences.
As far as I can tell it is no longer running anywhere in the world. And there is no obvious listing of where it ran in the past on their site.
5. “Beyond Van Gogh” was created by Mathieu St-Arnaud and Normal Studio.
It is still running in Austin (with Baltimore apparently coming soon). There’s also no obvious listing of where it ran in the past on their site.
6. “Imagine Van Gogh” was created by Annabelle Mauger and Julien Baron.
It has run in 16 cities worldwide and is currently still running in Stockholm.
Looking at these companies’ past tour dates and removing duplicates, at least 77 unique cities around the world have hosted an #immersive Van Gogh exhibit in the last three years (with some having multiple instances). This includes the top 15 or so metro areas in the USA and is likely an undercount given that companies 4 and 5 do not list where they have exhibited in the past.
APPENDIX:
You might be wondering, sure, the market for a projection-mapped immersive Van Gogh experience might have peaked, but did people like them a lot when they were around? The answer is: no, not really.
I took the list of the top 25 metropolitan statistical areas in the USA from Wikipedia and did a search on Yelp for “immersive Van Gogh.” Based on if the exhibit had a Yelp page (not all of them did), I recorded its rating on Yelp as well as the number of reviews so I could calculate a weighted average.
Across 20 different immersive Van Gogh exhibits, the minimum Yelp rating was 2.4, the mean Yelp rating was 3.0, and the maximum Yelp rating was 4.1.
The average across all exhibits I could find on Yelp, weighted based upon the number of reviews, was 2.85.
