MUSEUMS

activities as complementary platforms of a single mission. They take the ambition and intelligence and public commitment they bring to the galleries, and feed it into new channels onscreen.

Google Arts & Culture

When cultural institutions shut in China, then Italy and then the rest of the world, museum boosters blew the dust off a digital project some of us had forgotten: Google’s Arts & Culture initiative, which promises virtual experiences of the world’s great galleries with the same 360-degree views familiar from its Maps application.

Google has since partnered with hundreds of new institutions, and now you can toggle from the to the

with the flick of a browser tab. It had been awhile since I’d explored Google’s museum walkthroughs, and they remain a poor cousin of a real museum visit. The walk-throughs can also be years out of date: Google’s record of the Musée d’Orsay’s impressionist collection looks nothing like it did when I last visited in December.

Really, you don’t fire these up to scrutinize art. You do it for a quick, moderately pleasant immersion, one that allows you to think, at least for a minute or so, “I am there.”

With Google, therefore, concentrate on museums whose architecture tends to visual splendor, like the

whose painting collection hangs on free-standing glass easels designed by the great Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. Or Berlin’s

housed in a bombed-out neoclassical structure renovated by David Chipperfield.

Museum websites

A few historical museums have built robust virtual walk-throughs of their own — above all the

in Beijing, whose website and app allow you to explore the galleries and residences of the Forbidden City in very high definition. (The site has an English interface, but information on individual objects is only in Chinese.) The

site has sufficient, if not mind-blowing, immersive views of the Sistine Chapel and Raphael’s Rooms, while the

Art in Warsaw has some of the highest-definition renderings I’ve seen of current contemporary museum exhibitions.

For kids, the site

offers 360-degree tours of the lushest rooms in 13 of Paris’ municipal museums, including the

and

in Florence has just started its own virtual tour (of higher quality than the one Google hosts), and offers a 360-degree walkthrough of its Petite Galerie, a space for families and students.

But the smartest museums are thinking beyond the “virtual visit.” Since the coronavirus outbreak, the best on-the-fly digital exhibition conversions I’ve yet seen come from Estonia, where the has revamped its entire spring program for the web. Instead of dubiously “interactive” 360-degree views, Tallinn has produced highresolution video walkthroughs shot from fixed positions, within which you can click any object to scrutinize each sculpture or print.

It was once hard for museums, many of them small nonprofits, to keep pace with digital technology. A good number splurged on virtual displays programmed in Flash and other now disfavored protocols; others saw the web only as a marketing tool for the “real” museum offline. But costs have dropped, software has gone opensource, and several museums — like the

in Baltimore, the

in Edinburgh and especially the in Amsterdam — have made huge strides in collection display.

Streaming video

No museum has used streaming video more ambitiously than the

in the suburbs of Copenhagen, whose “Louisiana Channel” on YouTube has racked up more than 100,000 subscribers who can discover interviews, readings and performances by artists, authors and scientists.

The

Sydney’s major art museum, has made a fast and impressive pivot to YouTube since the coronavirus shutdown — flooding the social network with drawing lessons, minilectures, exhibition tours and concerts that give the museum a new, global public face.