Genius
Ashley and my mother-in-law Billye and I just went to the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit in downtown Detroit. It was, well, immersive. It was beautiful. By peeling the paintings down into smaller bits and “animating” each bit, so that, for example, a famous image will seem to arrive stroke by stroke on the wall-sized screen, or Van Gogh’s sun dawns over one of his famous peasants and moves from “east” to “west,” the exhibit forces the lazy viewer (me) to notice the compositional elements of the paintings. Nice, interesting music, not quite good enough to set itself off from the images but not annoyingly nondescript either, plays in the background. I enjoyed myself immensely and would go again.
I also heard a voice in my head the whole time saying: This is kitsch. This is what kitsch is. This is, in the most exact sense of the word, kitsch.