Mid last week (3 August), news spread that the Melbourne-based design firm Fenton & Fenton – known for supporting Australian designers and artists – had gone into liquidation.
The following day (4 August), headlines again bore bad news. The Toronto-based company Lighthouse Immersive, known for its immersive experiences of Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo and Claude Monet, filed for bankruptcy (Bloomberg).
‘The 28 July filing is a strategy to protect the company’s US assets during insolvency proceedings in Ontario,’ writes Artnet It is a staggering thing to consider, given the hype around these immersive events, and the fact that Immersive Van Gogh, since opening in 2021, had sold over five million tickets – or one for every 90 Americans – by May 2022 (Artnet).
Its website today still advertises the Van Gogh experience in Detroit, Las Vegas and Toronto venues (all wrapping up in October) – a significant pullback from the previous number of permanent Lighthouse Art Space venues, which were also in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Nashville and San Antonio. The company has also cancelled its immersive Disney show at its Houston and Atlanta venues.
Has the immersive bubble finally burst? And what of the Fenton & Fenton liquidation news? While neither of these companies is your typical arts organisation, they both represented a frontier for a broader audience engagement with creative ideas and making. So what could this mean, looking forward?
Retail pressures and shifting audience hype
Fenton & Fenton may be the top end of the scale – a designer homewares business – but news of its liquidation is unsettling for many studio businesses, which have seen a retraction in online shop sales and lower levels of stockist activity since the beginning of the year.
Fenton & Fenton’s website – now a single page – simply states: ‘Fenton & Fenton Pty Ltd (In Liquidation) is now in Liquidation with Adam Nikitins and Stewart McCallum of EY appointed liquidators.’ No further statement by the Melbourne company has been issued.
The company was founded by Lucy Fenton in 2008 and grew to include stores in Prahran and Collingwood, and a huge ecommerce arm. ‘Very quickly, representing Australian artists became a passion and a huge part of the brand,’ said Fenton in an earlier interview.
They offered the wares of Australian artists, glass and ceramic artists, jewellers and fashion designers, among others. There is no news yet on the status of stock holdings and outstanding sales.
In contrast, the mega global success of Lighthouse Immersive has ridden a wave with the uptake of new technologies and a hunger for immersive art experiences. One of the problems with this spike in experience offerings is the level of duplication. There are over 40 Van Gogh immersive productions that can be experienced in the US alone.
Van Gogh Alive, produced by the Australian company Grande Experiences, is one of them. It is currently being presented in Salzburg, Bangkok, Shanghai, Skellefteå, Brighton (UK), Indianapolis and Jakarta.
The current London exhibition Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience still runs shows every half-hour, six days a week, charging up to £35 for a standard ticket, despite no original works by Van Gogh being on display, reports The Guardian.
One of the appeals is that these experiences of famous Masters of the art world do not have the high insurance and freight issues that surround rare blockbuster exhibitions.
It in an interesting proposition when you start to stack this against the Australia landscape, which remains in full-flight immersive mode. A few recently covered by ArtsHub include:
- Couch wars: the challenge and the trend facing creatives
- RISING 2023 focuses on the experiential and immersive
- Minister gunning for more immersive experiences
- Immersive exhibition review: Frida Kahlo –The Life of an Icon
- Light event review: Dark Spectrum, Vivid Sydney
- Light event review: Resonate and Mirror Mirror, Illuminate Adelaide
- Exhibition review: Connection, THE LUME
- Review: Van Gogh Alive, The Royal Hall of Industries, Sydney
Clearly, we are starting to see a retraction on many levels. Purse strings are tightening, whether it be shopping for homewares and supporting Australian made or taking the family to a fun activity on the weekend with a hefty ticket price, the short answer is that we are possibly at the tip of an iceberg that has yet to reveal its Titanic proportions.
