Best virtual museums to visit
Cultural institutions press play on web and streaming video
In times of adversity, we look to art to give form to chaos. But where do you go when the chaos keeps you from art entirely? It will have to be online. As the coronavirus pandemic stretches on, keeping arts institutions closed across the globe, museums’ websites are now posting traffic numbers that were once unimaginable.
The Louvre Museum in Paris has reported a tenfold increase in web traffic, from 40,000 to 400,000 visitors per day. Visits to the websites of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London are also up by huge multiples. Audiences are seeking out arts material for children — the Metropolitan Museum of Art reports an elevenfold uptick to #MetKids, its youth education initiative.
Should a museum aim to replicate online the exact experience of visiting in person the world’s great picture galleries and palaces? They’ve been trying for two decades, and the pictures have certainly gotten crisper. In too many cases, virtual museum walkthroughs remain unwieldy, with herky-jerky navigation.
The truth is that a museum’s digital assets can’t duplicate its brick-andmortar presence — and the best of them, the ones I’ve selected here, do not try. Rather, they regard a museum’s physical and digital