Why Do We Only Value Artists Once They’re Dead?

It is hard not to see that the conditions in which an entity like ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ thrives are the same as those that devalue and exploit the labor of living artists.

“Instead of giving into despair, I chose active melancholy.”

At the start of Immersive Van Gogh LA, a voice-over intones these words from Vincent’s 1880 letter to his brother Theo as guests walk down the Experiential Hallway. That’s what we, the staff, are supposed to call the dark zigzagging corridor that winds from security to the café. It’s a hallway, but you really experience it. Then you’re in the café. Bursting with fake sunflowers, aswirl with neon starlight, the café invites patrons to try ten-dollar cupcakes and lollipops shaped like severed ears. Here, VIP and Premium guests will pick up their Van Gogh–branded cushions. There’s a giant portrait of Vincent looking pissed, and across from that a miniature Hollywood sign, which is set against a background of hills painted in Van Gogh–styled pastels. Inside the gallery, the main attraction is a thirty-five-minute looping video. Digitized and animated renditions of Van Gogh’s masterpieces (90 million pixels! the website proclaims) are projected on massive walls and set to music.

The Immersive Van Gogh phenomenon swept North American cities in 2021. Lighthouse Immersive, the Toronto-based company behind one of the most popular iterations of the concept, has converted those 90 million pixels into hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales and retail revenue. The exhibits are cheap to produce and expensive for patrons, a winning combination for attracting investors. Admissions fees run between forty and one hundred dollars, depending on whether you spring for Basic, Premium, or VIP entry. Between February 2021 and May 2022, Lighthouse sold over 5 million tickets.

I worked for Lighthouse at the LA exhibit as a gallery attendant for nine months. As jobs go, it was fine. But, as an arts institution, there’s a macabre disconnect between the space and its subject. The conveyor belt of selfie stations and upsold commodities is a strange invitation to reflect on the torments and passions of Vincent Van Gogh. There’s a tension between triumph and complicity, as when contemplating the agony of Christ in a megachurch. Van Gogh suffered, died, and was born again on the VIP souvenir cushion.

When Van Gogh wrote to Theo about melancholy, he was living among coal miners in Cuesmes and avoiding his family. At age twenty-seven, he’d failed as an art dealer, schoolteacher, bookseller, theology student, and missionary. “I am inclined to think the best and most sensible solution all round,” he wrote, “would be for me to go away and to keep my distance, to cease to be, as it were.”

When I took the job at IVG LA, I was adrift as an artist and a worker. Things weren’t living-in-a-coal-mine dire, but I needed the gig. I also wanted to feel connected in some way to creative life again. Before the lockdown in 2020, I worked at a theater and was active in my playwrights group. I saw new plays almost every week. True, my MFA in playwriting hadn’t translated into personal wealth. I juggled part-time teaching gigs and wrote textbooks to pay the bills. (“It is true,” Vincent wrote to Theo, “that I have wasted time when it comes to earning a living.”) But at least I was engaged in an artistic community and practice.

When I took the job at IVG LA, I was adrift as an artist and a worker.

With the lockdown, it was gone overnight. It wasn’t just the job: Live theater was over, and no one could say when it would return or what it might look like when it did. I tried to keep up with my writers’ group online. “Staged Zoom Readings” became a thing. But even as digital theater made valiant creative strides, I struggled to feel either inspiration or ambition. I didn’t know how to imagine a future in the arts anymore.

A former theater colleague tipped me off about the IVG job in summer 2021. Most of the new front-of-house hires were artists of some kind: writers, actors, musicians, designers, filmmakers. We were all eager for work. According to research from the organization Americans for the Arts, 63 percent of artists faced unemployment in 2020 and 95 percent “lost creative income” due to Covid-19. That’s on top of a preexisting crisis of economic precarity for artists. The National Endowment for the Arts reports that artists are already “3.6 times more likely to be self-employed,” often balancing part-time work and multiple jobs. Independent creatives had a harder time accessing a stable income and health care well before the pandemic hit. Some of my most talented friends had already left theater altogether, no longer willing to put up with the exploitation and burnout.

But it is expected that artists suffer. That’s the mystique of Van Gogh: He had a rough time, starving and drinking and hacking into the side of his skull, but look at those colors! The yellow sun shines brighter against the blackened teeth and coal dust. He died in agony and obscurity, but now, he is beloved. Now, you can buy The Starry Night on yoga mats and dog bowls. You, too, the dog bowls seemed to promise, might be beloved one day. The job was part-time and included no benefits.

I felt the first shivers of my own active melancholy during training. We were gathered in the shell of the former Amoeba Music building, Lighthouse’s LA headquarters. Old band stickers adorned lockers and peeled from unfinished wood. Our supervisors handed out a bio of theater designer David Korins, who designed IVG LA’s café and Experiential Hallway. The bio contained lines like “He’s got 20+ years of experience Jedi mind-tricking the world into getting what he wants” and “he has a master’s degree in turning a psychological desire into a physical space.”

Next they gave us a fact sheet about Van Gogh’s famously miserable life, followed by a presentation on merch.

After several delays, Immersive Van Gogh LA opened in August to swarms of visitors. Hundreds of guests arrived every hour. Because of capacity limits in the gallery, we often had to hold folks in the café. A line would form at the gallery entrance. Panicked messages crackled over our radios: “The line is encroaching into the Experiential Hallway!”

“Tell them there isn’t a line!” managers instructed. “Encourage them to walk around the café.”

“There’s no line!” I announced to the line of people in front of me. “Feel free to explore the café.”

“But there is clearly a line,” a man in the line protested. “They’re letting the people at the front of the line in first. I am standing in a line right now.”

At moments like these, I thought about David Korins and his twenty years of experience Jedi mind-tricking people into getting what he wants.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that’s true.”

I’m no David Korins. I only have a master’s degree in fine arts.

Cynicism was one of the few things that came cheap at IVG, an exhibit that boldly asks: What if an art museum were more like the airport? As artists filed for unemployment and delayed their doctors’ appointments, here was IVG, pumping hundreds of visitors an hour through its looping video of a dead man’s unsold art. But we were told our work had meaning. In a Zoom staff meeting, a Lighthouse higher-up gushed that the IVG experience “makes art accessible.”

There are original Van Goghs on display for free at the Hammer and the Getty. What exactly is limiting people’s access to the work of Vincent Van Gogh in 2022? Not enough pixels??? But IVG also asks, why go see a painting (boring, snobby) when you could instead spend a minimum of forty dollars to experience a hallway? Access, like art, is subjective.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the pixelating of Van Gogh’s paintings. It’s a fun, absorbing experience to vibe to when the second edible hits. It can, like any encounter with art, be very moving. People cried, tripped, brought their kids. I helped a teen stage a prom-posal! That was sweet.

But it is hard not to see that the conditions in which an entity like Immersive Van Gogh thrives are the same as those that devalue and exploit the labor of living artists. IVG uses images that fall in the public domain, avoiding expensive fees. The easily replicable model is designed for mass appeal and tweaked by location as needed. (Look, it’s the Hollywood sign!) Its primary product is the selling of more products.

My sense of melancholy deepened the more time I spent cleaning spilled cocktails and cajoling anti-maskers under the haunted gaze of a man who never saw a cent of profits off Van Gogh athleisure. Questions troubled me.

Why is there a toy ear under a glass case on the café counter?

What is IVG doing for the arts community here and now?

Who is the intended customer for the $950 necklace that features a jeweled pendant of Van Gogh’s face?

Why do living artists subsist on part-time gigs while dead ones become immersive money-printing machines for corporate enterprise?

What is she going to wear with the Van Gogh–face necklace?

Who invented the concept of the VIP cushion?

The cushions, man. So much of our job was distributing and sanitizing and carting around racks of cushions for people to sit on while they watch the film. They’re square, not very fluffy, and splashed with a sunflower and the ubiquitous IVG logo. The Premium guests get cushions with a white plastic tag that means they’re due back at the end of the tour, where they can be traded in for a Premium Van Gogh Portrait Poster. “Can I keep the cushion and not take the poster?” No!!! Not unless you are a VIP! VIPs get to keep the cushion and the poster. Guests would pout and groan and clutch the cushions to their chests. The cushions made people insane.

Why do living artists subsist on part-time gigs while dead ones become immersive money-printing machines for corporate enterprise?

“People love getting shit,” a coworker said. This is the principle––not “accessibility,” lol––upon which the Immersive Van Gogh empire is built.

I spent a lot of time in the stockroom assembling plastic sunflowers to poke into the rolled-up posters and stringing lanyards. VIPs also get lanyards. “They’re yours to keep!” I’d say, and they’d say, “Ooh,” or “Wow!” I wanted them to be happy.

The exploitation of the laborers producing the lanyards and cushions and posters and endless deluge of spiraling yellow-blue commodities is its own story. “It is true that the future looks rather bleak,” Vincent wrote to Theo.

When I sat at the poster desk distributing swag to families of Premiums and VIPs, I imagined the interiors of their homes. Did they designate one room––the bathroom maybe––the Van Gogh room? Does his gaze follow you from every surface? Or did they distribute the posters throughout the house? I also thought about all the things you could do with the forty to one hundred dollars spent on Immersive Van Gogh tickets. See a live band. Buy a record at the new Amoeba Music store. You could read books by living authors or subscribe to a lit mag. Stroll through a gallery or art fair. Donate to your local mutual aid fund and help a struggling artist pay rent. You could go to the fabric store and make your own cushion. You could see a new play.

The art might be bad or inscrutable or pretentious, but at least it would be alive.

If Van Gogh himself were to appreciate one thing about the IVG exhibit, I think it would be the fact that it employs artists. He would have sucked at the job, because he did not have a disarming customer service voice—too intense, too low-pitched and urgent and aware of the taste of paint. But still. The pay was decent and the hours were flexible. There was even a budget for staff to make a zine highlighting the artwork of fellow gallery attendants. This is the real way Immersive Van Gogh honors its namesake: providing living, working artists a paycheck and the chance to form community with one another.

Until the layoffs, at least. The crowds of summer and fall never really came back after the holidays. They assembled us in the gallery, stark white with no Van Goghs undulating on the walls, and told us hours were being cut. I got lunch with a coworker, who cried into their vegan sandwich. I was laid off in May.

In 1881, the year after Vincent wrote to Theo about active melancholy, he took up painting in earnest. For the next ten years, he devoted his life to color and canvas. He was impoverished, scorned, institutionalized. He befriended other artists and dreamed of living in an artist’s collective. He sliced through his left ear with a straight razor. He died at age thirty-seven in his brother’s arms.

Massimiliano Siccardi, the creator of Lighthouse’s animated loop of Van Gogh paintings, has said that the images represent what blazed across the artist’s mind at the moment of his death. Siccardi calls Van Gogh a “visionary.” Maybe in his final hour Van Gogh did catch a glimpse of his own past refracted onto the distant future. But perhaps it wasn’t the loop he saw. Maybe, instead, he saw the stacks of cushions in the storeroom and the sunflowers shipped from China in tape-swaddled boxes. Maybe he saw the VIP lanyards and Premium tokens, the absinthe-green VIP lounge, the Instagram boyfriends in their obedient squats. Maybe he saw the painters and writers on Sunset Boulevard explaining that yes, the vaccine requirement is listed on the website; maybe he saw us drafting our plays and filing our unemployment applications. Maybe, for one transcendent moment––or approximately thirty-five minutes plus credits––he saw it all.

“In the life of a painter,” the voice-over quotes from the shadows of the Experiential Hallway, “death may perhaps not be the most difficult thing.”