Immersive Art Exhibits Are Money-Minting Machines, and Monet Is Next
The only challenge on the horizon is too much competition.
Giant versions of Claude Monet’s Woman With a Parasol are projected at an exhibit in Boston.
Photographer: Patrick Hodgon
Far from Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, Claude Monet’s waterlilies bloom. The venue is not London’s National Gallery of Art, nor the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s the cavernous Saunders Castle at Park Plaza in Boston, a 10-minute walk from Chinatown. There, 40 projectors flood about 15,000 square feet of the historic armory with images of the impressionist painter’s masterpieces. During the 40-minute viewing, the music pairs soft melodies with bright poppies and crescendos of grand overtures with darker silhouettes.
Opened on June 16,“Immersive Monet & the Impressionists” fills 25-foot-tall walls with works from its headliner, as well as counterparts Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s boating party, Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, and Edgar Degas’s ballet dancers. Guests can do as they please in the space: stand in the center, sit on benches, or plop down on the floor. There’s no one right way to experience immersion.