When people engage with art, they accept and even embrace feelings they tend to avoid daily. These include, among others, the experience of negative emotions, peak emotions, cognitive challenges, semantic instability, uncertainty, and immoral behaviour. For about 300 years, philosophers and psychologists of art have argued that when people engage with objects identified as art, they adopt a cognitive mode distinct from everyday processing that affects subsequent interaction with these objects. We addressed this experimentally through a VR (virtual reality) study where 32 participants freely interacted with the same nine unfamiliar artistic pictures from a variety of styles presented either in an art (gallery) or everyday (shop) context. Participants expressed their experiences via a think-aloud protocol and the Art Reception Survey (ARS). Additionally, the dynamics of viewing distances were recorded, and participants also completed open-ended questions and questionnaires immediately after the VR experience and two weeks later. While the quantitative evaluative data did not yield significant differences between both contexts, the qualitative data revealed fundamental experiential differences suggesting that gallery-participants approached and processed the artworks more deeply, associatively, affectively, and less practically. We conclude that the usage of VR offers a great potential for understanding the deeper nature of the art experience.