Seen: Adam Platt

Give Me the Full Immersive! Submitting to the spectacles encroaching on real museums'turf.

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"IS THIS THE END of the movie or the beginning?" I heard someone say. We were in the Hall des Lumières, the new name of a landmarked former bank building on Chambers Street, and I too was attempting to orient myself in its trippy gloom. On a continuous loop, projectors were beaming strange cucumber-shaped whales onto the ceiling of the great vaulted room, and images of sunflowers and forests flecked with gold shone on the walls. Viennese waltzes played from speakers. This was "Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion, one of the latest cultural exhibitions (and surely not the last) to advertise itself with the two ubiquitous words immersive experience.

The space was half-filled with the characters you tend to see at galleries and museums on rainy weekday afternoons: distracted parents, pods of teenagers, tourists wearing dazed expressions and matching flannel shirts. Unlike at most traditional art venues, however, many of them were sprawled on the hall's cold marble floor in various attitudes of contemplation and wonder, and a few of them, like me, may have even briefly been asleep. There was also an entire room dedicated to Klimt selfies.

An older, bearded gentleman frowned silently when I asked what he thought of the show. But a younger patron from Miami named Isha, whose phone was alight with TikToks of her Klimting, told me she liked feeling "inside the artist's mind." This was her first immersive, she said with a gleam, but she and her friends were already planning to visit many more.