How Should Traditional Museums Think About Immersive Experiences?

Blockbuster art exhibitions were once largely the province of museums. Crowds now flock to popular immersive exhibitions—where all you see is a part of the artwork—in a new breed of art venue. Last year, some 2.4 million people paid approximately $25 each to experience teamLab’s Planets exhibition in Tokyo, racking up ticket sales on a par with box office revenues at the Met or the Tate.

That’s just in one location. Unconstrained by the limitations of exhibiting unique physical objects, teamLab welcomes visitors to at least ten far-flung satellites. Meanwhile, immersive productions by Balloon Museum, D’strict, Culturespaces, Meow Wolf, Otherworld, Grande Enterprises, Artechouse, Wonderspaces, Danny Rose, Projektil, Moment Factory, Layers of Reality and other similar enterprises are generating in excess of $1 billion annually in combined revenues.

The market for immersive productions is poorly documented, so we assembled a global database of some 370 immersive experiences to better understand what drives this nascent industry (a caveat: the database was last updated in spring 2024 and new experiences open and close all the time). What we found leads us to believe that, when it comes to immersive art, established art museums are stuck between staying on the sidelines of a potentially lucrative market or having to make onerous investments and adjustments in their programming approach.

Those that do choose to engage will need smart strategies.

Immersive Art Is Not a Monolith

Museums may stay away from immersive art experiences largely because they consider them to be lightweight entertainment. True, productions such as Immersive Van Gogh or Monet’s Garden, which use digital projection on the walls and floor to animate the life and work of canonical artists, are easy targets for such criticism. But consider that in the first twenty years of the Oscars, 14 out of the 20 Best Picture winners were adaptations of successful novels or plays.

Adaptations can be the basis for museum-worthy fare. The National Museum of Australia, in  collaboration with Grande Experiences, brought Australian First Nations art and music to a large audience with an experience titled Connection. It required extensive traditional curating skills to select artworks from the collection and build a cinematic story around them.

The entry point can alternatively be an established artist who embraces immersive technology.  David Hockney evolved his iPad drawings and films into a full experience, Bigger and Closer (not smaller and farther away) at the Lightroom in London as a forward step in his creative experimentation.

In any event, such immersive experiences using digital projection in the round to animate the work of bygone iconic artists represented only 29 percent of the experiences in our database and their share of the market is declining. A larger group—around 46 percent—consist of original digital-projection creations by living artists. Many, particularly those from leading Asian players such as teamLab and d’strict take inspiration from the natural world—flowers, fish, trees, waterfalls, and so forth. Others, like the works of United Visual Artists or Refik Anadol Studio, mesmerize viewers with more complex, abstract and often AI-driven algorithmic imagery. (Disclosure: one of the authors has advised Refik Anadol Studio).

The remaining 25 percent in the database involve installations requiring a far greater investment in physical installation infrastructure. A substantial group within this eclectic category, including Meow Wolf, Balloon Museum, or Factory Obscura, offer artistic fantasy worlds, some with an almost fairground feel. Others like Wonderspaces, Superblue in Miami, or Khroma in Berlin are collections of installations that lean closer to recognized museum fare.

All three segments exploit interactivity in some way or another. When approaching a waterfall, it may separate and flow around you. Some experiences activate not just sight and sound, but also touch and even scent. As a rule, the visitor is in the driver’s seat, his or her experience guided indirectly with a carefully staged, behind-the-scenes dramaturgical mediation.

“Key to these productions is the connection to theatricality, i.e. a journey that viewers need to take to complete the work by physically walking through it,” digital curator Kathleen Forde, who has worked with Superblue, told us. Indeed, some notable creators of immersive works, among them Es Devlin or Ulla Von Brandenburg, have a background in stage design.

This dynamic, interactive, all-around, multimedia, easy-to-grasp, theatrical experience may help explain why immersive installations are so popular with diverse audience segments, including children, that museums have long struggled to attract.

Challenges Await Those Who Enter the Market

Let’s assume museums can overcome their reservations about the museum-worthiness of immersive-experience works. Institutions that do want to engage may still hold back because they see major practical and financial hurdles to overcome.

Adapting or acquiring, and then equipping large amounts of space is one clear constraint. Size matters here. Small spaces simply do not have the same experiential impact. To compete with the big players, a museum will need to build out or otherwise secure several thousand square meters of floor space. Quality projection-based art often requires a 10-meter or even higher ceiling. These are halls that many existing institutions don’t have or can’t justify surrendering for extended periods.

Up next, new skills are needed. Creating an immersive art experience is akin to developing a branded consumer product. It relies on a multidisciplinary team to develop a single large-scale work – not, as with a classic museum show, on selecting numerous existing artworks and negotiating with peer institutions and artists for access to them.

Inventors of immersive art experiences are typically design studios that mobilize creative talent and technologists. TeamLab, for example, is a collective of some 500 people. When the lights are dimmed and music is playing in an immersive experience, there is little scope for the curatorial texts and commentary that are the lifeblood of a traditional museum exhibition. Traditional museums cannot easily afford to invest in new capabilities. They want to make use of the human resources they have.

In what may be the largest logistical hurdle, there are economies of scale to contend with. You must roll out your immersive experience to multiple locations to cover the high investment. Fever Labs, the top distributor, markets immersive artworks in about 40 leased locations simultaneously. This goes well beyond the ad-hoc collaborations museums forge around traveling exhibitions. It relies on networks and collaborative financing and marketing that are rare to nonexistent in the museum world.

Successful Museums Will Adapt with New Models

So, what are art museums to do? For some, the answer may well be to stick to the knitting.

Traditional art exhibitions will continue to hold appeal; arguably becoming more attractive to consumers if immersive experiences drive fresh interest in art. But with new competition for visitors, even museums that remain focused on traditional exhibitions will need to hone their game.

Museums that choose to compete head-on for the immersive-experience audience will need to manage the space, skill, and scale impediments we just outlined. On all these fronts, some form of business collaboration may help to share risk, cost, expertise, and prestige.

In France, the Grand Palais has opted for such far-reaching collaboration. They established a separate enterprise to manage immersive experiences, Grand Palais Immersif, in partnership with the state-owned Banque des Territoires and the private real estate developer Vinci Immobilier. Grand Palais Immersif, in turn, joined forces with the Opera National de Paris to create an immersive space inside the Opera Bastille. The first exhibition at that venue, Venice Revealed, was the product of yet another collaboration, with Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and the Iconem Studio.

To find the space, a museum may not have to build at its existing high-cost, city-center location. Instead, it can look for a more affordable solution, while potentially engaging a new audience where they live. Many immersive studios work with real estate partners that are seeking to invigorate shopping centers and struggling urban areas. Others take over disused industrial premises. Culturespaces in Baux de Provence operates in an old quarry. Eonarium uses churches. And you may not need to buy. Perhaps you can rent.  

When it comes to scale and skills, newly commissioned projection- or screen-based works or smaller arrays of physical installations would seem closest to museums’ traditional programming. Each work in the collection may be limited enough in scope that a single artist or a small team can take responsibility for it. More legacy institutions are engaging in this way.

The Centro Cultural Banco de Brasil’s exhibition, Eternal Light – Essay on the Sun, brings together digital projections by seven Brazilian artists. ARoS museum, in Aarhus, Denmark as part of its new build, invested in Level Zero, a space dedicated to immersive works. Yet there is a risk here, too. By focusing on something closer to what a museum already knows how to do, it may not get the same impact that a larger investment in a single coherent immersive work might deliver.

Looking Beyond the Spectacle

Where the field may be headed next is a strategic balancing act where traditional and immersive experiences complement and sustain one another, each yielding benefits in the form of audiences and funding, audience appeal, and cultural prestige.

“Museums exist on a spectrum,” Aziz Isham, executive director of New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, told us. “While there are still quite a few that have a ‘look at object / read a panel’ approach, there are many that are experiential. Most are a hybrid.”

As a final response, museums can look elsewhere for innovation. Technology is changing fast. Notably, AI will clearly offer vast market opportunities for museums that, for some, may be a better fit. Already, projection-in-a-box technology is starting to cycle out. Instead of going all-in on a single display medium, future “black box” immersive spaces may strive for maximum flexibility, allowing artists to experiment with ever-changing tools to bring to life digital-physical, interdisciplinary productions using technology old, new, and next.

In the end, it all comes back to the quality of the art. What will unlock museums’ interest in immersive experience is work that embodies beauty and meaning, presented at scale with a powerful sensory flourish.

“As the medium matures, museums will find ways to engage thoughtfully, focusing on meaning over spectacle,” said Adam Levine, director of the Toledo Museum of Art, which has debuted immersive experiences in the United States by Stan Douglas and Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg.

The search is on for museum-worthy productions featuring already-recognized artists and pioneers from an upcoming digital-native generation who are experimenting boldly with new mediums. Where museums look, museums will find.

Even so, and no matter what, art museums now face new competitors. Sitting back and watching them capture audiences is not a promising option. Museums have to respond. One size will not fit all.

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Felix Barber, based in Zurich, is a former Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group and the co-founder of Dazlus Ltd, a start-up in AI and AR digital art and entertainment. András Szántó is a cultural strategy adviser based in New York; his most recent book is Imagining the Future Museum: 23 Dialogues With Architects (Hatje Cantz, 2022).