{A} fter visiting Phoenix, I had a few open days. I’d never been to Salt Lake City and knew little about it that seemed reliably true. I naturally look at received wisdom not with disdain but with my mother’s voice in my head. “Don’t believe everything you read” is common sense, but we live in uncommonly addled times. To Utah I went. And what is Utah? America is a big, colorful, motley country, but Utah is a storied anomaly. Brigham Young said “This is the place” in 1847, affirming to a harassed, tired, but fervent cohort that at last they had found a home. Is it a place for art?

Utah and the Mormons aren’t known for it, though Wayne Thiebaud, who I think was the best painter of his era, was a Mormon, not practicing, but by upbringing. Mormons, by the by, are abstemious when it comes to booze, tobacco, caffeine, and sex outside of marriage, but, I learned, they have a keen, even rapacious sweet tooth.

Phoenix has deserts and mesas. Salt Lake City has serious mountains, mountains that make Vermont’s seem stubby. The city is in a bowl, which means there’s smog, which I didn’t expect. Salt Lake City is not big, either, and doesn’t hustle and bustle. It’s neat as a pin — no surprise — and, at least architecturally, tame.

Salt Lake Temple and a chunk of Temple Square are construction sites these days. The temple is “in restauro” for earthquake retrofitting and overall renovations, with the entire square in rehab. This is Ground Zero of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Joseph Smith, the LDS’s founder, prophet, and visionary, divined a temple city like Jerusalem as well as a religious state, to use a freighted term, so the Salt Lake Temple is a big deal. He didn’t live to see it — or the Great Salt Lake — having been murdered, but how the temple should look and function was among his visions.

Mormons attend Sunday services in small, neighborhood churches. Temples are for ceremonial events occurring in specific ritual spaces. Since many of the spaces are sacred, temples aren’t open to the public.

Completed in 1893, it’s Gothic Revival with six slender, tiered towers, and it does indeed, as Young wished, center the city. Young wanted it to project permanence, refuge, and authority. That it does. The state capitol is on a little hill less than a mile away, looking like half a dozen other state capitols and the nation’s capitol in Washington, D.C..

Tower windows are long, vertical slits, like Medieval fortress towers in Italy. The LDS exodus west, the polygamy crisis, the Utah War in the late 1850s, the church’s top-down culture, the centrality of obedience to the faith, and, let’s face it, the faith’s quirks left Mormons with a sense of siege and a natural tendency for insularity. Mormons can be dry or wet, unlike Hasidic Jews, but Mormons, unlike other tight, faith-directed Christians, have their own state. About two-thirds of Utahans are Mormon.

The Salt Lake Temple is buff-colored. Many other LDS temples are gleaming white. They make a chromatic statement, evoking purity and virtue whether set against a cityscape of office buildings or framed by trees. The six spires of the Salt Lake Temple give it an attenuated look. The exterior, as far as I could see given the scaffolding, is packed with Masonic symbols such as the all-seeing eye, the compass-and-square, clasped hands, cloud symbols, and five-pointed stars. There’s not a single divinity, though the temple is topped by a statue of the Angel Moroni. Together with the geometric Masonic symbols, this makes for a clean, crisp look. It’s not a chatty exterior. Mormons don’t like their temples living cheek by jowl with other buildings. The Salt Lake Temple is set apart. It’s got high visibility. It looks a little like the White Tower in London — a Norman keep, castle, and, by the by, prison.

Knowing very little about the church, I found the Church History Museum a feast. It’s very, very well done, with high but by no means slick production values. Interpretation isn’t baby talk but, rather, works for all audiences except children, theology professors, lapsed Mormons, and resolute cynics. Catering to the remaining, broad chunk of humanity is a tough task, but the curators do it. It’s like a company museum. Scandals, doubts, scoops, and things that don’t add up aren’t on the itinerary.

The main, ongoing exhibit, The Heavens Are Opened, mixes history and dogma from the early days of the Second Great Awakening — around 1800 — to the abandonment of the LDS temple at Nauvoo in Illinois in 1846 and the trek west ending at the Great Salt Lake. It uses wall text, mural-size illustrations, artifacts, photographs, reproductions, audio passages, and a video.

I knew next to nothing about Joseph Smith (1805–1844). His visions starting in 1820 in a forest grove near Palmyra in upstate New York led to the Book of Mormon, a new twist on Christianity, a mass religious movement, Smith’s murder, and Utah as we know it today. I knew he was born in Sharon in east-central Vermont, the son of farmers who moved west after crop failures in the mid 1810s, all perfectly believable and, as a plan, uncrazy. Vermont had a population boom around 1800 followed by an exodus west not much later. Vermont’s land just isn’t ideal for farming.

The exhibition describes the Angel Moroni’s appearances to Smith and shows what the curators say is a best-guess facsimile of the Golden Plates on which Moroni transcribed the Book of Mormon in unknown Egyptian hieroglyphics. There’s a photograph of Smith’s oval, chocolate-colored seer stone, a sacred object presumably stashed in the Salt Lake Temple. The initial revelation, in the woods near Smith’s home, isn’t depicted as a shock-and-awe event. It’s luminous and serene, splendid only in the sense that, for most of us, simple beauty is the splendor of truth.

Seer stones are like divining rods. They’re old-English and early-American folk-magic devices used to see or find what’s hidden. Smith used them to translate the Book of Mormon into English. I read the Book of Nephi, part of the Book of Mormon. It’s part Pilgrim’s Progress, part Zane Grey, part Jules Verne. The press that produced the first 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon is in the show. Smith, whether a charlatan or a holy man, was a marketing guru in the best American tradition.

Excavations around the Smith farm in Palmyra unearthed enough bric-a-brac for a display good enough for you-are-there authenticity. Audio quotes from Smith and his wife develop the story, as does an excerpt from Ask of God, Smith’s account of his first vision.

I’ll put aside what’s possible, what’s plausible, and what’s probable. In the Old Testament, prophets seem to be on speed dial to Zion. A sea parts, plagues descend, and then there’s that big whale. The New Testament? Well, the Virgin Birth demands a suspension of disbelief, as does the fish fry for 5,000 and other moments we accept through faith.

As a teen, Smith could read and write — maybe — but the Book of Mormon is an opus. As literary savants go, we’ve got Arthur Rimbaud, Mary and Percy B. Shelley, William Cullen Bryant, and then there are savants in music. And none of them organized a new religion. Strange as the Book of Mormon’s plot might be, it tackles familiar subjects such as immorality, the excess of individuality, apostasy, and the devaluation of the Gospels.

From the Golden Plates onward, it’s an unorthodox Westward Ho story. We — and the early Latter-day Saints — go from Palmyra to Kirtland in Ohio, Independence in Missouri, and then a swamp near the Mississippi River that became Nauvoo. Plural marriage — polygamy — gets a bland wall panel. Plural marriage was Smith’s idea, gleaned from a vision. We don’t learn it in the exhibition, but he made it soap-opera-worthy.

Smith was in and out of jail as a public nuisance and, at the end, for treason. Nauvoo grew, the faith spread, and in 1844 Smith launched a campaign for president. Of the United States. His platform touted the abolition of slavery, unfettered religious freedom, and a new national bank. That summer, Smith, again in jail, was killed by an angry crowd of locals — not Mormons — and leadership passed to Brigham Young. Bars from one of Smith’s jail cells, his death mask, and the official document incorporating Nauvoo add touches of realism to a fantastic story.

History museums are usually so text-heavy that it’s dizzying, but people learn differently. The Heavens Are Opened smartly draws from the written word, images, and the spoken word, creating a total package. The museum and Temple Square — a very short walk away — are essential first stops for new visitors.

After walking through the history exhibition, I visited With This Covenant in My Heart: The Art and Faith of Minerva Teichert, a retrospective of the work of one of Mormonism’s most prolific religious artists. Teichert (1888–1976) was a muralist who worked primarily in Wyoming. American religious art is a very niche genre. The Puritans opposed graven images. From that point, a taste for altarpieces never developed, even among Episcopalians. American ecclesiastical stained glass is abundant and gorgeous, but religious painting is rare.

Teichert was trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York. She’s a very good artist. I love, say, Murillo, whose religious pictures are often gentle and soothing, his figures ever-so-gauzy, and his colors in pastel tones. No blood and gore for him. Lots of fat Spanish babies, which isn’t surprising since he had eight children and a ready supply of models. He was a favorite of the Victorians.

Teichert’s tack is similar, but instead of a pleasingly gauzy, fuzzy finish, she seems to apply a layer of cotton candy. It’s very sweet. I can’t say she takes what’s vaporous and returns with something that’s vapid. Her art is dogmatically correct and pretty, but pretty like a Hallmark card is beautiful.

While visiting the museum shop, I saw that Teichert’s work is a popular Mormon style. It’s easily digested art. Mormons are famously clean-living, which is both a great good and much scorned by slobs who can’t keep their lives in order. Caravaggio is hard. Martyrdom is gruesome. Mormons serve, whether in their mission work, neighborliness, or raising families, the bigger, the better. The art of angst doesn’t fit in the program. It casts a pall. Mormon art is about the message, not the medium. It’s about prayer, not artistic expression.

Mormons are definitely not unsophisticated. The mission-service mandate takes them all over the world. It’s an international church. Unlike Jews, who are also to be found everywhere, Mormons are a networked group who are, more or less, all on the same page. This is fine, but, like everything else, it can be bad. I’d heard that Utah has more arrests for Ponzi schemes per capita than any other state in the country. Communities with high levels of trust are vulnerable to multilevel marketing schemes. Layers in a scheme might be innocent members of their church or their neighbors or family.

Teichert’s art is G-rated, suitable for families, and made for viewers who trust. It doesn’t coddle but caresses and comforts. It’s art that tells the viewer that everything is in good hands. It’s art that isn’t meant to be taken at face value.

The work in this too-large exhibition makes Mormonism look easy, which it might very well seem to those who follow the rules. Life can be crushingly cruel for those who don’t or, worse, can’t.

I don’t think Van Gogh 360°, the immersive sound-and-light experience I attended in Salt Lake City, is any help in knowing Utah or Mormonism, though the show is the stuff of visions. Enough friends and readers ask me whether or not I’ve seen it that I decided to immerse myself in what I hoped would not be a pool of schlock. That it’s not. It was running while I was in SLC at the Leonardo, a small museum of science, technology, engineering, art, and math — not STEM but STEAM.

Seated on a folding metal chair, I had a single perspective. Different images flood all the walls, so it’s immersive, but I stayed in my lane. The acoustics were lousy. The space, on the third floor of the Leonardo, wasn’t built as a theater. I’d suggest cushy swivel seats for comfort and flexibility.

“What was it like to be Vincent van Gogh?” the narrator asks, which is a good question suited to the dazzling, swirling images and van Gogh’s mental problems. The close-ups are beautiful and deliver the texture and impact of his thick, viscous brushstrokes.

Is it worth it? At $30 a head, I’d say no. I don’t think the Leonardo comps anyone, but as a journalist — and summoning my beleaguered, borderline-crazy, senior-citizen face — I paid $12. It’s money spent in the interests of inquiry.

Images shimmer and shake. Some dissolve into puddles as they fade. Much of the narration is from van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo. Van Gogh was an exceptional, evocative writer. “I’d rather paint people’s eyes than cathedrals” has the ring of truth.

Close-ups of his nocturnes are smashing. His deep blues, juxtaposed against glaring greens and yellows, create Big Bang night skies. His pictures of irises, blown up, look like stained glass, not as an architectural element but as the eyes of God. Colors build, float, and fade as passages are magnified. Sometimes I couldn’t recognize the motif, but that’s good. Van Gogh was, after all, a modern artist.

All the major works are covered. His final collapse is blood-free but poignant. “I feel like a caged bird who knows he can fly,” he writes. There’s music, too. I recognized Mozart, Handel, and Edith Piaf crooning, “Je ne regrette rien.”

I enjoyed it. The program, lasting an hour, is a moneymaker, and it’s playing in museums and in theaters all over the world, though I’m not sure whether there’s one version or many produced by different outfits. Immersive van Gogh is no substitute for the real thing, but neither can the real thing match the show’s fireworks, detail, and big screen.

Next week is Americana Week in New York, so I’ll cover the Winter Show, the premier dealer show of antique American furniture, silver, textiles, and folk art, among other things, and the suite of auctions of American decorative arts, paintings, and rare documents. The week after, I’ll return to Utah, with a story about the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, located at the University of Utah, and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.