The next best thing

With COVID-19 shutting down many museums worldwide, you can still enjoy many of them virtually. Google’s Arts & Culture collection (artsandculture.google.com) has numerous museums online, accessible for free.

In New York, the Guggenheim, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art are all accessible through the website. In London, there’s the Tate Modern, and Paris’s Musée d’Orsay is also there. The Rijksmuseum and van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Uffizi Gallery in Firenze, the MASP in São Paulo, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Te Papa in Wellington, the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the US National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC are also present. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s rich heritage is also explored at the site.

The British Museum can be found at britishmuseum.withgoogle.com, while the Louvre has virtual tours without resorting to reliance on Google at www.louvre.fr/en/visites-en-ligne.

Street art can also be found via Google, with audio commentary from an art expert, at streetart.withgoogle.com/en/audio-tours. You can also search by artist, though not all of these have commentaries.

For those who prefer the great outdoors, Google has partnered with the US National Parks’ Service, which shows off their country’s various terrains at the same Arts & Culture website. The US National Marine Sanctuaries have 360-degree virtual dives, which can be viewed at sanctuaries.noaa.gov/vr/. •