“Monet’s Garden” had a selfie station

the immersive art world would probably one day have its version of Francis Bacon

“You have the music, you have the movement. You don’t necessarily need a background in the artist to appreciate it. You feel things right away. And afterward, we’ve found, people are much more likely to go to traditional museums to continue the journey.”

Instagram-friendly

digital video and sound technology got better and cheaper

It’s a familiar theme: critics remain divided – many seeing immersive art as social media-fuelled gimmicks tailored to an audience shorn of concentration span; entertainment rather than serious artistic endeavour. Yet according to Kim Logchies Prins, co-founder of Moco Museum, which has outposts in Amsterdam, Barcelona and London, immersive exhibitions tap into audiences’ desire for deeper, more engaging interactions with art. “Over the years, I’ve seen how people crave experiences that go beyond passive observation,” she says. “Immersive art offers a space where viewers can step inside the artwork, becoming participants rather than mere spectators.”

didn’t impress the Parisian art press, the exhibition broke all previous attendance records.

“We broke away from the traditional ‘look but don’t touch’ art gallery experience to reimagine this space as an interactive playground where visitors don’t just observe – they build, create, and engage,” says Alero Akuya, vice president of global brand development at the Lego Group.

Lego

posted visitor numbers that outstrip those of the nearby British Museum since launching in 2022

glitzy

In Tokyo, teamLab Planets, an immersive exhibition encouraging barefoot exploration of its lush animated realms, set a Guinness World Record for attendance, welcoming more than 2.5 million visitors in its debut year.

showcasing digital art or reinterpreting existing pieces

“We want to nurture a new generation of art enthusiasts, says Rosie O’Connor, curator at Frameless,

brand activations

But when did art start leaping off gallery walls?

impressive attendance records

digital art venues have gone from disruptive outliers to big business

What started as a trickle is now a flood

what explains this recent boom and where is it heading next

. They may even be opening up art to demographics who have never felt comfortable engaging with art in a traditional setting and that can only be a good thing.

We’ve seen this at Outernet which has worked with established art institutions. Alexandra Payne, Creative and Content Studio Director for Outernet London says: “... we've been committed since opening our doors almost 2 years ago to championing the importance of public art within the urban landscape. We are now the UK's number 1 visited cultural attraction due in large part to us providing free accessible art and experiences … This unique position has resulted in meaningful partnerships with some of London's most established art institutions such as The Tate, Saatchi Gallery and The Serpentine as they recognise our ability to reach a diverse audience and the value our platform brings to the art world”.

There’s space for film buffs to gain value from action movies and avant-garde cinema, music fans to enjoy both pop and classical and for readers to consume both page-turners and more challenging reads. Likewise, there should be space for the visual arts to contain a spectrum of art and art experiences. The easier access points to an art form may act as a gateway to the more challenging elements - i.e. people who read page-turner thrillers may then try out a classic n

We’ll likely see the lines blur further between traditional art space and immersive experiences as they both tap into the demand from visitors for unique experiences and while cynics may see this as a dumbing down of arts and culture it doesn’t have to be seen in that way and this approach is a reflection that the arts have been and largely remain elitist.

experience economy.

‘Instagrammable’

Statistics from 2018-19 from the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)1 showed that just over 50% of adults had visited a gallery or museum at least once in the last year and this number is lower among Asian (43.7%) and Black (33.5%) people. The difference is even starker when you look at professional occupations (66%) and more manual occupations (36%)2. It shows that there is a large untapped group of people not engaging with visual art and if these people who don’t frequent galleries and museums prefer an immersive art experience, then I’m all for it.

Making art accessible is a key goal of mine and many other art professionals, and we should be open to celebrating any novel attempts to make art accessible even if it doesn’t fit into the traditional museums and galleries model that we’re used to.

As Frameless Art Curator, Rosie O’Connor states: “We know that people who visit galleries as children are more likely to consume culture as they reach adulthood, but they can struggle with the height of the paintings and inaccessible language rooted in the art world. At Frameless the whole experience has been designed to be entertaining and accessible to all with an aim to spark an interest in these magnificent artworks and to hopefully even inspire visitors to seek out the original versions”.

hese immersive experiences often appeal to those who find traditional galleries and museums hard to access or as places that are ‘not for them’.

Florence Hallett writing for ‘the i’ said a Van Gogh experience was “voyeuristic, distasteful and spectacularly uninformative” and Eddy Frankel writing for Time Out, reviewing the recently opened Moco Museum, referred to immersive art in general as “London is just entering its lobotomy era”. I’ve also savagely critiqued similar exhibitions and said of a Bob Marley exhibition at Saatchi Gallery “you may enjoy parts of it, but you’ll feel emptier after and hate yourself for it”.

as soon as one opens critics like me are lining up to pour scorn on them.