In 1859, in his Salon, Baudelaire settles his score with photography: the photographic industry, he writes, is "the refuge of every failed painter". What he condemns is not any particular image, it is the apparatus. Judging a work by the tool that produced it is a reflex as old as modernity, and it returns with every new generation. And the other day, it turned up in my inbox…

For nearly two years, I have been in conversation with the director of a festival. He knows my work. One fine morning, out of nowhere, this reply:

"I'm sorry, but I don't present VR. Good luck."

Imagine my bewilderment! Beyond this sudden and somewhat cavalier about-face, nobody writes "I don't present spotlights" or "I don't programme microphones". You turn down a show, an aesthetic, a statement, not a device. Unless the device has ended up taking all the room, to the point of becoming the very name of the works that use it.

The headset has become the emblem of a world: the world of tech bros, Mark Zuckerberg leading the charge, who promised a parallel world and delivered legless avatars. Then cultural policy took over: targeted calls for projects, an "industry" to structure, an injunction to artists and venues alike to convert. Hammered home again and again, the immersive has become a box to tick, and those who programme have reached saturation. To refuse VR is to refuse that narrative, even if it means throwing out the works with the headset.

I understand this rejection all the better because I share it a little bit. The Sutherland test rests on an alternate history: in 1968, Ivan Sutherland burns his eyes while building the first virtual reality headset. The device we place over the audience's faces displays nothing; it organises a voluntary blindness. DISNOV_XR_2000 stages an exhausted startup founder, trapped inside a malfunctioning immersive demo. Two pieces that turn the headset against its own narrative.

So let me reassure him. He is right. I don't present VR either. The headset is not a destination, it is a detour: what matters is inhabiting the world again once you take it off. This is not a question of format. It is a question of the gaze.

And a gaze, I dare hope, is something any festival can still programme…