VIRTUALLY YOURS

Offerings from The Natural History Museum, London include a virtual self-guided tour of the galleries and an interactive experience about Hope the blue whale

Just as the world locked down, some of its most highly acclaimed cultural spaces opened up online, allowing us to travel to see the art wonders of the world from our living rooms. Millie Bruce-Wattexplores the virtues of virtual art tours

Although lockdown physically confined us to the four walls of our homes, technology broadened our horizons like never before. Thanks to interactive 360-degree videos and full ‘walk-around’ tours, we were able to visit all corners of the globe withoutactually leaving the sofa. We were given the opportunity to visit first-class exhibitions and wander through some of the world’s most famous cultural spaces whi le sipping o ur morning coffee.

The announcement of free virtual museum tours was unquestionably one of the few saving graces of lockdown. From the Natural History Museum in London and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in South Korea, the world’s artistic talent was at our fingertips. These virtual art tours offered us an escape during the lowest points of isol ation. They could disconnect us from o ur phones, stop us from endless vacant searching and scrolling on the web and remove us from earshot of the news, if only for a brief while.

With over 6,000 years worth of creative treasures at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, virtual visitors are able to bounce from Neolithic clay figures to Van Gogh’s Irises in one fell swoop. A few Google searches later, you c ould be walking through t he rich sites of the Vatican, revelling in the wonders of the Sistine Chapel, and then, enjoying lunch in Bilbao, exploring the Guggenheim’s collection of post-war American and European paintings and sculptures – Rothko, Holzer, Koons and Kapoor all featuring in the gallery.

The tours also allow us to explore the spaces in minute detail, a luxury that is rarely available even when w e’ve paid to be t here in person. The Mona Lisa is very often viewed from a distance, over a crowd of bobbing heads. But now, thanks to the powers that be – namely Zoom and its interactive relations – we’re able to visit the Musée d’Orsay and explore its artistic delights with friends that are sitting hundreds of miles away, something that in real life would not be financially plausible or physically possible .

T he Museu de Arte de São Paulo in Brazil also has one of the broadest historical collections available in its virtual gallery, with works spanning the 14th century through to the 20th. Here the museum’s paintings have been suspended in the air around the open-plan space so that you feel as though we are standing in one of the museum’s great halls.

Closer to home, our much-loved and missed museums, gallerie s and festivals also s upplied us with much-needed entertainment during isolation. The Holburne, Victoria Art Gallery and The Roman Baths were just a few of the city’s popular spaces that adapted to their situations, and brought creative workshops, Q&As and online exhibitions to our living rooms. The Bath Festival also powered on ahead, despite the sad news of its cancellation this year. Ensuring we got our culture fix, it compiled virtual weekend g uides, which consisted of must-see gigs, concerts, operas and theatre shows to keep us going through the quiet times.

Some have argued that the aesthetics of the virtual tours have taken precedence over the sharing of knowledge, with digital experiences sometimes finding it difficult to share the history of the art and explain why pieces are there – something that museums h ave worked hard to improve over the years. And yet the future of the digital experience is