MCAT CARS Question of the Day

A museum room converted into an immersive projection chamber is an instant crowd magnet. Visitors are bathed in animated brushstrokes, music swells, and movement choreographs their gaze. Attendance surges, social media obliges, and administrators note with relief that the numbers finally look buoyant. It is tempting to declare such spectacles the long-sought solution to the perennial anxiety about relevance. But we should be careful about what exactly is being made relevant.

Paintings were never just images; they were objects that resist us in stubborn ways. A canvas has a particular surface, a frame with a history, a scale that can dwarf or intimate. The material thing confronts the viewer with slowness. Projection systems, by design, smooth that resistance. They translate an encounter with an object into a bath of light, adding narration, editing, and declared points of focus. The result can be genuinely moving. It can also flatten difference, making a singular work dissolve into a loop of highlights.

None of this is to insist that digital tools are inherently corrupting. Used judiciously, they can scaffold curiosity, giving a novice viewer a way into a difficult work or helping a child see the layering of a fresco. They can also make visible what objects hide: layering, underdrawings, repairs that reveal a work's life. The trouble comes when the scaffold becomes the destination, when the promise of immersion becomes an end in itself rather than a means to the object's stubborn presence.

Museums exist within pressures that reward the spectacular. Budgets depend on tickets and donors like to be dazzled. The question is whether institutions can exploit spectacle without being consumed by it. That will require curatorial discipline: designing shows where light serves the object rather than eclipses it, where projection is a prelude, not a substitute, for standing before the thing that bears scratches of time.