Time to Gogh

I went to the "Van Gogh Experience" when one of them (apparently there's at least three) was in my city. The sign for the restrooms said "If you need to Gogh..."

I did manage to make it through the revised Galerie Vivienne chase, and the brand-new aftermath scene I ended up adding. So now I'm in the middle of the Van Gogh scene...and I'm not ready.

I'm intentionally not having a lot about the artist and his life this time. There's some beats I want to hit, because they play to other themes. But I don't really need to talk about his time as an apprentice preacher, or the way he stayed in South London for a while. 

What I do need is for the exhibit to seem like it makes sense. For the paintings that are playing on the projection loop to at least pretend to tell a story about his life and career. So I need to understand a bit more than I do. I don't need factoids. I need a feeling for the flow of it. And also, a feeling for what parts of his life there are images from him that are memorable enough to people more used to "Starry Night" to at least sort of recall.

The trick about these exhibits is that they really are a lot of favorite hits. And they present a curated and perhaps sanitized vision. The one I saw, I don't remember a single one of his sketches of the miners of the Borinage, for instance. 

And I'm just now realizing I really have only three more of these "chunks" of art history to finish off the novel. There's a bit of the petite ceinture, and some more stuff about Picasso, but really there's three biggies left and this is one of them. The other two are both novelists, and buildings. The Paris Opera House through the lens of the long and strange history of dramatizations of Leroux's book, and Notre Dame de Paris through the (original) preservationist intent of Victor Hugo.

Just as well. The hot weather is over for the moment but I'm not feeling up for much more than watching movies about Van Gogh. And contemplating purchasing Cypberpunk 2077 or (a very, very distant second) Starfield.