So long ‘immersive Van Gogh’: we deserve better than this cynical and elitist approach to art | Rachel Connolly

We never needed gizmos and expensive tickets to enjoy great art. If Disney's Lighthouse Immersive is ailing, that's no bad thing

Repetition and familiarity are everywhere in our culture. From the commercial novels advertised entirely in terms of their similarity to popular titles from the previous year or two, to endless and proliferating film franchises, the selling point of so many things now is, in effect: this is a slightly (even very) worse version of something you've seen already. The immersive art" concept offered by companies like Disney's Lighthouse Immersive is the purest form of this wearying trend, so recent news that Lighthouse has filed for bankruptcy feels like a faintly promising development.

Lighthouse Immersive puts on shows in which reproductions of work by household-name artists are blown up and projected on to the walls of galleries. Music is piped into the space to curate the mood, taking the place that imagination plays in a traditional exhibition. The idea is that these magnified projections encourage an audience to appreciate the finer details of certain famous paintings.