Immersive Art Review: Arte Museum (Las Vegas)
The Arte Museum in Las Vegas is a series of projected rooms with beautiful displays of varying lengths. This is by FAR the best immersive traditional immersive Art experience I have been to, but it lacks the interactive elements that make TEAMLabs and Meow Wolf enchanting. The talking walls of Fahrenheit 451 are coming, and most likely, Arte's team is poised to profit on full 360 degree digital theater experiences in big ways…they know how to use projectors better than anyone else. For now though, they have a very nice collection of extremely beautiful Windows 95 screen savers, and not the ones with games.
So first, the pros. The most impressive room in the place is a long hall, completely projected, where they play about 35 minutes of three shows. The Vegas show was pretty lame, and strangely low quality in some places. The Jeoson painting show (traditional Korean paintings) was really cool, although I was very shocked that while they didn't feel any qualms about digitizing and bringing to life aspects of the paintings, they for some reason drew the line at making any color-corrections on faded yellow parchment paintings. The most well put-together piece was a series of impressionist and post-impressionist painters, which wowed with its display. I was fully immersed and enjoyed the paintings immensely…by projecting them around the room, you had to wander it if you wanted to see all of them…if I wanted young people to engage art in a museum setting in a new way, this would be how I would do it. However, the display did lack an overarching conceit/flow…maybe it was an amalgam of the greatest hits of other shows they had put on in the space? For example, at one point Van Gogh was on one wall and Ganguin was on the other…it was a little confusing and distracting, especially when Manet and Klimt were given center stage all to themselves for 3 minutes a piece, and Ganguin's style is so different from Van Gogh's.
For these exhibitions to be truly stunning though, we'll need to let the paintings be public domain and let whoever wants to use images of them do so. Can you imagine walking into a four-walled room (like a simulation-room in a Sci-Fi show) and picking an artist, and being able to watch a 20 minute presentation of their best 150 pieces shown to you a few at a time? Or every Van Gogh painting we know of? Sure, it's not for everyone, but I would love it. Being able to choose between hundreds of artists, you could self-curate a show to your liking. Movement should be incorporated not as a gimmick (the boat swaying in the tide), but to show off the brush strokes. (I believe I once had a screen saver that "painted" famous paintings, for example)
Back to the museum, my favorite room was the infinity room with Stars/Rain. The light routine of colors plus music in an infinity room felt almost out of place here, transplanted from Dubai's Aya, but it was by far the most beautiful space, and I watched the short show three times. The use of paper lanterns with colored LEDs inside them instead of light strings was gorgeous, and added something I'd not seen in other infinity rooms. For some strange reason, either the ceilings at Arte weren't mirrored, or the people at Arte were very concerned about modesty (don't wear skirts to an infinity room), so the infinity rooms were significantly less infinity than some of the ones at TEAMLabs Tokyo and Aya, where you could see yourself echoing to infinity not just in the side walls, but below you as well. (While Arte tried to create this effect in the Waterfall room, the echoes below were very dark)
The other parts I enjoyed most were the two other interactive pieces: In the Flower room, they had beautiful ambient noise and a piano. I sat down and played a few pieces, trying to match the vibe of the place. It was amazing for me, and other people liked it, but if you weren't a pianist, might not be as interesting. I would have loved to hear other pianists playing, while leaving the space open for me to engage also.
The second interactive piece was super simple, but engaging. Coloring sheets could be scanned into a live menagerie of animals trotting across a projected wall. It's been a while since I've used crayons, and I may have not colored inside all the lines, but it was fun! However, it seems to me they should have 20–30 animals, so that you didn't have 4 versions of the same five up on screen all the time. If you're going to have spaces like a piano that only some people could really enjoy, why not allow people to create their own characters that can be scanned in and programmed with simple commands or a phrase? (Sure, you'd have to censor some, but people could have easily drawn or written profane things on their coloring book animals too.)
The rest of the rooms were beautiful but pretty blasé. Sure, it's cool to have projections of waves coming at you, or animals watching you. However, all of their water features lacked a certain life that you get from real water features…they lacked an AI feature or generator that would randomize the waves, so that the loop would be endless rather than just the same thing every few minutes (not posting how long the loop was gave me some anxiety too). Likewise, without environmental variables, the water just does the same thing, the swells in the beach room never really get bigger or smaller…perhaps it's a specific bone to pick, but TEAMlabs does think about these things, so Arte needs to as well. As it stands, the choice to play with digital water seems strange, because video or digitized video of real waves would have been prettier and more lifelike. (this is not to say that their algorithm for water behavior wasn't impressive and will probably be used in movies and video games for 10 years or more, it just triggered my uncanny valley sensors) The animals and leaf scenes looked very similar to the ones at TEAMLabs, but at TEAMLabs the use of algorithms, AI, and sensors means that the projected walls are interactive. After playing with the things on the walls, just watching them felt a little underwhelming, even if Arte's graphics were at times better than TEAMLabs.
Lastly, cost should be mentioned. A weekend ticket was $65, and the parking they recommended was another $23. (The two nearest parking garages were both that much) While I understand that their projectors are the finest and some idiots keep breaking their mirrors apparently, $90 seems like way too much for an immersive art experience, particularly one that isn't particularly interactive like the best of them, or personal like an escape room.
All in all, I liked Arte Museum and enjoyed what they had to offer…as far as digital "art museums" go, it's pushing the boundaries and taking the traditional "Van Gogh" room immersive art to its limits. However, it could use a lot more variety, creativity, whimsy, and interaction/AI generation to make it a truly amazing experience. It also lacks a cohesive idea/conceit/aesthetic that unifies the experience of the disparate rooms, which makes some of them delightful and surprising, but makes others seem out of place. While I enjoyed the experience, I'm not sure it's worth the price tag, and given the choice, I'll pick Meow Wolf or TEAMLabs any day.
But hey, Arte seems to be dominant in South Korea, and I might be moving there soon, so you might see some more Arte reviews in the near future!
