Subscribers can explore Acute Art’s new VR museum with work from well-known and up-and-coming VR artists.
You will now be able to walk through the halls of a new museum and interact with art from leading VR artists from your home with Acute Art’s new virtual museum.
The museum will be available exclusively on HTC Vive and will feature some of the most highly recognized VR artists including Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, and Anish Kapoor.
Eliasson is premiering a new piece called Rainbow, a full-room installation—virtual, of course—that has a large interactive rainbow which shifts position based on where you are standing. But, it is a community piece that allows multiple people to interact with it and each other like a true museum.
“Virtual reality has the potential to become a platform for new ways of experiencing if we include the body in our virtual work—I don’t believe in leaving the body behind,” Eliasson said in an interview. “To me, this social aspect is crucial; it emerges through recognizing the presence of others, by experiencing others’ impact on a space.”
The museum will also feature the work of Jeff Koons, who recently partnered with Snapchat to display his metallic balloon-like sculptures across the world in AR.
His piece Phryne will also be on view. In this experience, the user follows a metallic ballerina, very much of Koons’s signature style, through a calming garden. The hope is for the users to experience self-affirmation in the virtual space.
The artists featured the launch, however, won’t be the only ones. Acute Art plans to rotate their exhibits and feature new guest-curated exhibitions like physical art museums often do.
Acute Art’s VR museum app is a free download on Steam, with a monthly subscription of $9.99 or an annual membership fee of $29.
The cost attached to VR art for the creators are extraordinarily high, and the platform for sharing those works—while dynamic and quickly budding—can be challenging to enter. Acute Art provides a space in their virtual museum, called ‘The Factory”—which is free of charge—to showcase works by more than 50 up-and-comers.
“In addition to paving the way for artistic innovation within the rapidly evolving VR field, Acute Art aims to make certain that fine artists have a central hub to create, develop and share work within the vast digital future,” said Acute Art CEO Jacob De Geer, who helped co-found the gallery in early 2017.
