Last Friday I took the day off from work so that Eric and I could visit the Immersive van Gogh exhibit that is currently at Lighthouse Los Angeles. We’d seen it advertised months ago and were both intrigued, so I purchased tickets earlier in the year, and we’ve been looking forward to it for months. I made sure my schedule at work was cleared for Friday October 15, moving a bunch of meetings around to accommodate a day off. The morning of the event, we both got dressed up and headed out fairly early for the trek up to LA. When we arrived, we got a perfect parking spot on the street right outside the entrance of the Lighthouse, as someone else was pulling out. We bought the VIP ticket package, so we didn’t have to wait in line (we also each got a complementary cushion to sit on and a poster to commemorate the event). Everything was going just great.
When we entered the venue, however, I was almost immediately disappointed. There were people everywhere, including a handful of kids running around, which I hadn’t anticipated in my fantasies of the experience. It was also not very “immersive,” in my opinion. The venue, which included just two cavernous rooms, was all wrong—too angular and open, with mirrored-columns everywhere, and a dark-colored ceiling. For me, there was absolutely no benefit to actually being in the venue at all—I would have enjoyed the work just as much (or, probably more so) by watching it on my computer screen in the comfort of my own home. Van Gogh has been a favorite of mine for many years, and the experience just didn’t live up to my expectations of it at all. I enjoyed having the day off and spending it with my husband, but we could have invested the $200 we spent on tickets on something more enjoyable and of higher quality.
I hate that this post reads so negatively, but I was just really disappointed. I wanted it to be a more personal, immersive, provocative experience than it was—much like my first intimate experience with van Gogh, which happened during the fall semester of my sophomore year of college. I was nineteen years old, taking a studio art class to fulfill one of my gen-ed requirements, and I really enjoyed the course as it was a much-needed departure from my otherwise full schedule of science courses and labs. One of our assignments was to reproduce a classic painting, and I chose to do van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” I found a picture of it in a big art book I had inherited from an uncle but hadn’t much looked through until I had to complete that assignment. The book, I discovered, was filled with the most amazing images, and also included a bit of van Gogh’s life and history.
Although I now realize that “Starry Night” is an iconic work of art, in my rather limited and sheltered nineteen-year life experience at the time, I was just discovering it for the first time. And, having to reproduce it on canvas myself, I became intimately familiar with it… every little brush-stroke. I imagined a whole world in that painting as I recreated it myself, and that was a much more immersive experience than the one I had more recently in LA. I was nineteen years old, just beginning to figure out who I was, and “Starry Night” is an image I’ll always remember from that time. I suppose, then, it’s no wonder I was disappointed by my experience last Friday—perhaps I was expecting to recapture some of the wonderment and self-discovery of my nineteen-year-old self, and that’s a pretty tall order.
I’m experiencing a different sort of wonderment and self-discovery in my life now, and for that I am incredibly grateful.
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