Just when everyone thought the art world had come to a standstill, with every art festivals, fairs, and exhibitions being canceled due to the lockdown, several galleries across the globe are trying to reimagine ways to hold shows for art lovers in covid times. New exhibitions and shows are being hosted on the virtual space, to be experienced seamlessly on smartphones and laptops from the comfort of your homes. For those willing to buy paintings online, these virtual tours and online shows are a must to explore. With dynamic viewing interfaces, they have lots to offer — a collection of videos, photographs, drawings, paintings, and new media presenting dystopian and utopian images of these difficult times and a post-covid world.

Here are some of the world’s most popular art museums worth exploring:

• The Louvre  

With a comprehensive range of virtual tours and shows covering a number of iconic artworks from its diverse collections, this iconic Paris museum is a treasure trove waiting to be experienced for free and from the safety of your home.

‘The Advent of the Artist’ — an exhibition in the Louvre’s Petite Galerie, space dedicated to art and cultural education, is now open to the public via a virtual tour. Celebrating Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, and Michelangelo, this exhibition features the works from the likes of Dürer and Rembrandt along with the literature from the time to explore the emergence and recognition of the concept of the artist. 

With additional content available online related to art history, the collections, and the construction of the Louvre museum, the visitors to their website had increased more than tenfold during the lockdown.

• The British Museum  

Though the doors of the British Museum in central London are shut until further notice, it’s interactive The Museum of the World experience through time, continents, and cultures is a worthy alternative for you.

A paid partnership between the British Museum and the Google Cultural Institute, this project helps you to embark on an immersive artistic journey of human history from the comfort of your home. Using the advanced WebGL (Web Graphics Library) technology, it allows users to navigate through the rich collections of the British Museum from prehistory to the present through the click of a button.

The museum’s website has attracted legions of new visitors since March. Also, some of the individual online tours organized by this cultural institution have shown massive growth, including the one exploring LGBTQ objects and works throughout history, received more than a 1000% increase in visits in the month of March compared to February 2020.   

• Museum of the Earth  

Based in Ithaca, New York, this museum was opened in 2003 as part of the Paleontological Research Institution. Combining engaging and interactive displays, hands-on features, stunning fossils, and science-inspired art, the Museum of the Earth provide you with a unique opportunity to discover 4.5 billion years of history of Earth —from the tiniest trilobites to the mighty mastodon.

Adapting well to the period of lockdown, the institution has come up with many special online exhibits including ‘Bees! Diversity, Evolution, Conservation’ wherein the ultra-high resolution images demonstrate the importance of bees to plant and animal life.      

The museum has been successful in encouraging critical thinking about life on Earth in the past as well as in the present, and how the humans are affecting the natural habitat.

•  Van Gogh Museum 

The Dutch art museum dedicated to the works of Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries in Amsterdam has been making the most of its online resources during this lockdown.  

Providing 4K YouTube private tour videos of the museum’s permanent collection, and informative website pages containing stories about Van Gogh’s life and works, the museum has been witnessing an unprecedented uptick in the number of daily visitors to the website. Also, the traffic to their social media channels is surging rapidly.

The museum has been continuously expanding its digital repertoire, with the recent addition being 125 ‘Van Gogh Questions’ offering fun interactive engagement from the safety of your home.

• The Street Museum of Art

Like the British Museum, this cultural institution has teamed up with Google Arts and Culture since 2015 to showcase street artworks online that in real life are often designed to disappear as quickly as they are created.  

Celebrating street art and graffiti culture, several virtual exhibitions are curated by the museum, many of which are attracting new visitors during this coronavirus crisis. Among them is  ‘Amazing Street Art Murals in New York’ featuring stunning curbside creations in the Big Apple by emerging local artists and big names of the oeuvre including s England-based street artist Banksy, the Brazilian graffiti artist Eduardo Kobra, and the popular American pop and graffiti artist, Keith Haring.  

• Museum Island Berlin  

Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museenzu Berlin) — the institution that oversees the cluster of world-renowned museums located on the Spree river in the central Mitte district of the German capital — has made significant additions to its digital art collection since all of its institutions were closed in March 2020 owing to the ongoing pandemic.  

All the 15 collections of this cultural institution can be explored online, including the famous Bode Museum, which provides a virtual tour of sculpture collection, Byzantine Art, Münzkabinett, and the paintings from the Gemäldegalerie. Combining nearly 62 interlinked 360-degree panoramic views of the entire museum, a detailed database of 850 digitized sculptures and paintings is also available alongside.  

Since 2011 the Staatliche Museenzu Berlin has also been working with Google Arts and Culture. During this lockdown, the institution has ramped up its presence on the Google platform via a Museum Island portal. Currently, it features around 5,000 objects, 40 exhibitions, 37 short narratives, five virtual reality tours, six expeditions, and ten artworks in a gigapixel format  along with the street view of all of the five museums with permanent art exhibitions. The most visited on the virtual tour is the Pergamon Museum.  

So, what are you waiting for, discover your favourite art collection from your home!