Beyond van gogh3/7/2023 ![]() Watching the children at play, I had to wonder: when was the last time I’d seen kids that energized in a museum? It’s not easy for static paintings to capture our modern, digitally addled imaginations-if it were, shows like “Beyond Van Gogh” would flop. The populist merits of “Beyond Van Gogh” should not be dismissed lightly. ![]() If others were, like me, a bit disappointed that the show was just one large rectangular room, with blurry areas where each projection lined up with the next and visible grid lines underneath all the images, I couldn’t tell. ![]() I also noticed more than one date that seemed to be going well, many successful photos snapped, and one or two journeyers inside the paintings whose trips might have been psychotropically enhanced. My cold, elitist heart was mostly impregnable throughout the 45-minute show, but it did melt a bit to see kids chasing digital almond blossoms across the floor and gazing in wonder as the whole room shifted to pale blue. What “immense joy” can be found in “Beyond Van Gogh Austin” is accessible mostly to children and those in pursuit of their next great Instagram backdrop. (Speaking of, there are distorting mirrors at the entrance of “Beyond Van Gogh” that transform the visitor’s body into the swirling forms of late, haunted canvases like Starry Night, a cute trick.) The Beyond Van Gogh Experience. It merits consideration for dates and family outings alongside escape rooms, wax museums, and fun houses. “Beyond Van Gogh” belongs squarely in the category of a boardwalk or tourist-center diversion. Pulsing, animated stars populate the walls, black-and-white sketches fill in with color, and viewers of a certain age will feel an instinct to nudge a mouse and get back to Windows 95. One critic recently compared these shows to “wall-size screen savers,” and the same thought occurred to me as I immersed myself in the spectacle. Even the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, who lamented the bygone “aura” of one-of-a-kind paintings and sculptures in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” would throw up his hands at the many layers of knockoff simulation at play. National arts reporters have struggled to distinguish the various shows on offer, which are the handiwork of different animators and composers, and to assess claims of being the “original” Van Gogh immersion-a dubious concept for infinitely reproducible exhibitions that traffic in public-domain digital images. ![]() “Beyond Van Gogh,” which opened Friday in Austin, is one of a half-dozen independent productions of Van Gogh–inspired wall-and-floor projection shows appearing across the country. I was instructed that, despite his suicide in 1890 at age 37 shortly after lopping off his own ear and offering it as a gift to a brothel maid, “Van Gogh’s work radiates joy and celebrates life,” and that “to experience his work is to open oneself to immense joy.” Steeled for delight, I reached the portal. I spent ten minutes winding past screens of text explaining, in hagiographic terms, the life of the Dutch Postimpressionist painter. There, a nondescript warehouse beckoned with a playful sign reading “Gogh This Way.” In the paved, arid expanse of COTA in summer, absent any landscape or human figure that might have compelled Van Gogh to pick up a paintbrush, I drove past five empty parking lots and into a sixth. My immersive journey into the mind and work of Vincent Van Gogh began with a twenty-minute drive to the Circuit of the Americas, the motor sports racetrack outside of Austin.
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