We paid nearly £90 for 3 of us. I went with an open heart. I was quite moved after I’d read some of the quotes from his letters to his brother Theo in the first section of the exhibition but when we walked through into the next section (via an empty holding area with a moving projection on the wall that looked like something from a student rave in the 80s) I was ready to be blown away.
My heart sunk because I honestly felt like I was in somewhere like Braehead but with people sitting on the floor and toddlers running around or in buggies looking restless. It was just a huge rectangular space with a door in and a door out, 2 upright rectangular blocks - all very hard-edged. And the colours weren’t very rich or bright - it looked a bit over-exposed.
And the ceiling was just there looming above the visuals with all the air ducts and vents - no attempt had been made to knock it back by use of clever lighting. In film and photographic studios I’ve worked in, they have this thing called a cyc - which means you make the joins between the floor, walls and ceilings disappear by having a continuous gentle curve at the joins - none of that had been attempted. There were seats for about 10 people at most and then the saddest, meanest bean bags that were small and half-filled. I wasn’t ‘immersed’ in the world of Van Gogh - I just felt like I’d contributed my hard-earned cash in an extraordinarily mediocre cash-generating enterprise.
It’s a huge company behind this - putting these events on all over the world. I bet some are in more interesting, sympathetic venues, which might help. Maybe it’s down to how these things are set up technically that makes all the difference? But anyhow this felt very stripped-back. I was quite pissed off by the time the portraits started ‘blinking’ at me - would have been more appropriate to have had them ‘winking’ knowingly at me in a ‘they saw you coming mate’ way. I say, pissed-off, we all ended up giggling to ourselves and thinking WTF would poor, poor Vincent have made of all this.
When we realised the ‘experience’ had looped back to the beginning again we trundled off to what felt like the real main event - the Gift Shop. The quality of most of the stuff in there was pretty sub-standard too. Back out into the real world and a £12 flat-rate car park charge.
I felt completely and utterly ripped off!