There are worse ways to spend an hour than being surrounded by gigantic projections of Impressionist paintings while listening to the greatest hits of the Belle Epoque, but don’t imagine that Monet and Friends – Life, Light and Colour is an art exhibition. This audio-visual extravaganza, at Sydney’s Royal Hall of Industries, is a spectacle with one foot in the past, one the future.

This event and last year’s Van Gogh Alive are direct descendants of the panoramas and spectacles of the Victorian era which invited customers to view a single gigantic painting, a vast photographic survey of some natural wonder, or another ingenious contrivance. An entrepreneur might buy a famous painting and take it on tour, recouping the purchase price and making a profit from ticket sales. The most famous example is Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World (1904), which was bought by a wealthy shipbuilder and sent on a hugely successful world tour in 1915-17. It was claimed, incredibly, that four-fifths of Australia’s population of 5 million turned out to see the work.

Grande Experiences, the company behind Monet and Friends, may not be hoping for quite the same level of success but these mega-projections have proved popular with audiences around the world. One suspects this has more to do with our inveterate love of light shows, from the New Year’s Eve fireworks to the annual Vivid festival, than a fascination with art history.

Nevertheless the art history is crucial to the success of the package because Monet and Friends allows the viewer to believe that he or she is not merely enjoying a fabulous slide show but receiving an education. This is not so different from the way museums package their blockbusters, with much “educational” material including childrens’ labels, introductory videos, guided tours and lecture programs.

The difference is that Monet and Friends is art history lite. We begin in the lobby, sampling a timeline of events and brief CVs of the featured artists. These summaries are amusingly formulaic, almost always telling us how the artist died, usually at a tragically early age. There is a pithy quotation and one or two random bits of biographical data. We are told, for instance, that Toulouse-Lautrec’s “walking cane was hollowed out and filled with liquor,” and that he was “also known to frequent prostitutes.” Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know?

The glitzy but gimcrack nature of the presentation is reflected in the name of the parent company. Unless there is someone called “Grande” involved, “Grande Experiences” is not quite English and not quite French. If it were English there would be no ‘e’ in “Grande”, if it were French the name would be: “(Les) Grandes Experiences”.

Monet and Friends offers us a more passive experience than that provided by the average museum blockbuster. It’s also more expensive — an adult ticket to this event costs $40, as opposed to the National Gallery of Australia’s Botticelli to Van Gogh, which will set you back $28.55.

Instead of peering at paintings over the heads of other viewers in a crowded room, one is able to stroll around a cavernous hall or sit on a bench and let the artworks unfold on all sides. One views the pictures in a fast-moving sequence interspersed with quotations from the artists; archival photos; snatches of vintage film; freshly shot glimpses of landscapes, flowers, cities and trains; discreet animations, and the odd sentence of commentary. While all this is happening, you are being bombarded by the music of composers including Debussy, Offenbach and Tchaikovsky. There is even an olfactory component, with scents both woody and astringent being wafted into the room, although my nose wasn’t sufficiently sensitive to detect any of them.