I believe that art museums serve many purposes beyond being repositories for paintings, sculptures, and other works. For me, they’re places that provide inspiration, education, and space for quiet reflection and peace. While museums share art and context and create community, they provide me with an overall sense of awe, wonder, and—importantly—gratitude.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting an empty museum after hours, the experience can be even more special, more profound.
With concerns over the coronavirus closing museums, large and small, around the world, I was thrilled, a couple of days ago, to see an article in The Art Newspaper by Aimee Dawson. She shares that there are hundreds of top online museums and art tours that you can enjoy from home. (I’ll share that visiting world-class art for a few hours is a nice way to get your mind off of the 24-7 news cycle.)
Dawson says that the best place to get started is:
Google Arts & Culture tours: International Museums
Your first stop for online art tours and resources is definitely Google’s Arts & Culture platform: they have digital documentation of more than 1,200 international institutions. From virtual tours to high definition images of works from the collections, you could get lost for hours on this site. You can search by artist or art historical periods, or you can look at museums from a particular country or browse your local area in the map view. The institutions included on the platform include the big names like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence as well as smaller but well-loved spaces like Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.
With my thanks to The Art Newspaper, I’ll send you to their original article. The resources that Dawson has pulled together aren’t just resources for this troubling time, but for all time.
Feel free to share.
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