A private viewing of the Renaissance genius's works will be broadcast and shown in cinemas. Is this the start of something beautiful?

The Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci dreamed of many inventions that uncannily anticipated the modern world, from alarm clocks to a flying machine. But even he might have been surprised and mystified by the latest technological innovation in modern culture: the private view live-cast.

On 8 November, when guests turn up to the preview of Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan at the National Gallery, the event will be broadcast live not just on Sky HD, but also in cinemas all over Britain. Guests to the private view are warned they may be caught on camera – so wear the lounge suit without the egg stains! If you go to the local arts cinema instead, you can wear jeans, but what will you experience with your popcorn?

I recently found myself remembering the amazing Danny Boyle production of Frankenstein that I saw at the National Theatre. It took a minute to remember that in fact I saw it at a cinema. Like many people I've found myself attending cinema live-casts of noted theatre productions.

Leonardo Live takes this idea one step beyond, into the realm of the art gallery, where you will see Tim Marlow and Mariella Frostrup tour the most comprehensive exhibition of Leonardo's paintings ever put on by a museum.

The scale of a cinema screen won't be any substitute for seeing Leonardo's painting Lady with an Ermine, coming from Poland, up close for yourself. So the appeal of these broadcasts is surely the sense of a great national occasion. As well as Frankenstein, (which now I come to think of it was a live film of a play directed by a film director, from a book famous through film adaptations) I went to see Derek Jacobi as King Lear, another play shown live at the movies. In the last act there was a breakdown in the transmission: the entire play had to stop and start again. It certainly proved the whole thing was live, and it seemed somehow to belong to the early days of television.

In the 1960s BBC2 would dedicate entire evenings to live outside broadcasts of, say, an archaeological dig. Today, the range of channels makes this sense of occasion hard to recapture: it takes a royal wedding or a reality show to produce a collective television moment.

Live events, from festivals to protests, are popular because they get us out of the house and away from the randomness of the information age to experience a rare shared reality. Leonardo Live reflects the genuine sense of occasion that an exhibition by the greatest artist who ever lived surely deserves.