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Volume 11, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 2045-5836
  • E-ISSN: 2045-5844
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Abstract

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in early 2020, were felt across all industries and public institutions, including art museums. Shuttered art museums sought to maintain public interest in their collections and exhibitions by promoting existing online tools, such as the virtual art museum tours hosted by Google Arts & Culture. This article analyses these tours from the perspective of museology and architecture and argues that, rather than a form of virtual reality, these tours are a peculiar kind of image database. As such, they are part of Google’s growing efforts towards mass digitization and data accumulation.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • The Swedish Research Council (Award 2018-06057)
© 2022 Intellect Ltd
This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND), which allows users to copy, distribute and transmit the article as long as the author is attributed, the article is not used for commercial purposes, and the work is not modified or adapted in any way. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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2022-04-01
2026-04-11

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/content/journals/10.1386/jcs_00053_1
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The Museum in Quarantine: Architecture, Experience and the Virtual Museum
Journal of Curatorial Studies 11, 4 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1386/jcs_00053_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jcs_00053_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jcs_00053_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): Art Institute of Chicago; Google Arts & Culture; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; museum architecture; online exhibitions; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; virtual museum tours

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