Escape at the Museum

For a few decades now, there has been a significant increase of immersive installation art at art museums. Immersive installations differ from traditional art exhibitions as they are site-specific, resemble theatrical mise-en-scène and provide a hyper-realistic, sensory experience to visitors by requiring to physically enter the space a work occupies. Currently, the attention to this art has been growing together with the critique. On the one hand, experiential, entertaining immersive art draws crowds of people to museums and offers extraordinary art experiences. Thus, this art has become an important field of action of museums since they strive to attract larger audiences. On the other hand, these installations are criticised for resembling entertainment venues and negatively influencing the audience’s relation with art and encouraging passive consumption of “retinal art”. This qualitative study is aimed at researching the immersive installation experience at the museum and questions, how does the immersive art experience differ from that of the usual? By means of ethnographic research (participant observations, semi-structured interviews) comparison of visitors’ experiences and behaviour at two art settings, one traditional and one immersive type, have been presented. Both exhibitions chosen for the research: “Mad About Surrealism” and installation “Infinity Mirror Room” by Yayoi Kusama were situated at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in Rotterdam. Visitors analysis revealed noteworthy differences between these shows. It was found out that people at the traditional exhibit mostly engaged with the artistic content at the cognitive level, they were also significantly calm, physically passive, did not have many social interactions, yet were significantly sensitive to the social environment around them. Whereas at the installation, visitors engaged intellectually at a lesser extent, were highly social but less sensitive to the social climate, appeared more active yet less than it was expected. Finally, there was different emotional engagement level between two shows, if, at the Surrealism exhibition, people were emotionally distanced from artworks, at the installation, the relationship with art was more personal and influenced introspective, embodied experiences. This proves that the immersive art changes the established museum experience and, moreover, suggests that other approaches, for instance, more attention to emotional, experiential, social dimensions instead of cognitive perception could help to comprehend this phenomenon better.