Overview

• In its first five weeks, “Euphoria: Art Is in the Air” drew roughly 200,000 visitors to the Grand Palais’s 4,000-square-meter inflatable installation, part of the Balloon Museum’s touring exhibits that have amassed over seven million participants since 2021.
• Curator Valentino Catricalà designed the show to encourage touch and photography, featuring balloon landscapes by artists such as Philippe Parreno, Sun Yitian, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Paola Pivi.
• Worldwide parallel trends include immersive projection exhibitions of Klimt, Van Gogh and Picasso, with formats like “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” and Paris’s Atelier des Lumières attracting millions.
• Culture figures Pierre Balloffet and Jean Baudrillard warn that such Instagram-ready spectacles risk turning museums into entertainment parks, eroding contemplative engagement.
• As a counterpoint, the Slow Art movement promotes device-free, prolonged viewing of fewer works, and scholars like Ilan Stavans alongside artists Amalia Ulman and Arvida Byström defend the selfie as a valid, democratized form of self-portraiture.