The fever unleashed by Vincent Van Gogh’s immersive exhibitions, in which his popular paintings, projected on huge walls, come to life, comes to New York City, where two different companies will fight this summer to attract the wave of tourists expected to return to the Big Apple.
Both open to the public on practically the same dates (from the beginning of June to the end of September), have almost identical names (“Immersive Van Gogh” and “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experiencie”), and are located in the southern tip of Manhattan. . Both allege, moreover, that the other exhibition is a copy.
“They say that imitation is the greatest compliment,” Corey Ross, one of the producers of “Immersive Van Gogh,” said in an interview with Efe, when asked about the competition.
“IMMERSIVE VAN GOGH”: WORKS FROM THE BEST MUSEUMS IN EUROPE
Ross stresses that his show is the work of Italian filmmaker Massimiliano Siccardi, responsible for the “Starry Night” exhibition, which rose to stardom after appearing on the Netflix series “Emily in Paris.”
“(Siccardi) He is the Steven Spielberg of the world of immersive installations. He has worked on them for 30 years and has created shows that have been very successful in Europe and have been seen by millions of people,” he adds.
For his “Immersive Van Gogh”, he details, they have obtained permits for 400 images of the painter from the best museums in the world, which he reconstructs to form a new work of art.
“I feel sorry for the public, because there is a lot of confusion,” says Ross about the similarity of the two events, after which he points out that the Better Business Bureau, a non-profit organization that seeks to promote consumer confidence, is investigating the way in which your opponent promotes the business.
“VAN GOGH: THE IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE”: MORE THAN 1,800 SQUARE METERS OF EXPOSURE
In total, the show’s producer, Lighthouse Immersive, has mounted an exhibition of more than 14,000 cubic meters, while its rival, “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experiencie”, has 1,858 square meters of exhibition, in addition to a reality experience virtual tour in which one walks through the places that inspired the iconic Dutch artist.
“We have here more than 2.4 million bits of information and 125,000 individual frames that we convert into a video. So it is more advanced than many other digital technologies,” explains Mario Iacampo, CEO of Exhibtion Hub, who together with the company Spanish Fever is responsible for the show.
Iacampo points out that their first immersive exhibition took place in 2017 in a church in Naples, and since then they have passed through Milan, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Vienna, Brussels, York and Beijing, among others, while they are organizing exhibitions in London, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, Miami, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Hamburg and Munich.
“We started in 2017, the other show here in New York started in 2019, so unless we had a time machine, it is impossible to have copied them,” he explains to Efe Iacampo.
“I always say that the public is not blind. (…) The product speaks for itself,” adds the representative, who argues that what differentiates them from the rest of the long list of similar samples is what they address in their show , which is not limited to projecting animated images of Van Gogh’s paintings, but tries to bring the public closer to the artist by talking about the events that marked him.
“It’s not just about his images, it’s actually about the artist and his life,” he ditch.
Although the “war” in New York is between these two exhibitions, they actually represent only a small part of the enormous number of spaces that try to attract the public with Van Gogh images, since this summer only in the USA. there will be about 50 immersive exhibitions of the Dutch artist spread over 26 states of the country.
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