Visit the world’s greatest museums from home

Discover arts and cultural sites from all over the world

By Gracey Hitchcock

Beat winter boredom by using your computer to virtually visit some of the world’s best museums, art galleries and monuments. If the weather is bad, or your budget won’t stretch to include travel, you can tour the Taj Mahal in India or visit the Guggenheim in Venice with a simple click of your mouse.

Museum web sites offer activities and experiences that can be recreated or restaged outside of most normal exhibits. At the Smithsonian Institution’s web site, you can watch an animated step-by-step photo-sequence of Tibetan monks constructing their elaborate post-9/11 Healing Mandala sand mosaic. Or, observe South India’s Sacred Chola bronze statues not as just static images, but in context, decorated and used in religious festivals.

Closer to home, the Canada Aviation Museum web site allows you to access original, beautifully illustrated photo essays on topics related to flight.

Immerse yourself in an online art world

Museums all over the world are digitizing their collections, allowing anyone to order photos and peruse essays for research projects. Enthusiasts can now view treasure troves of information and images — which in the past might have taken hours or days of travel to access — from their own PCs.

Janna Graham, an educator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, also enthuses about the web’s potential when it comes to displaying art. “During the Yoko Ono show, we created a virtual ‘wish tree’ online, similar to the one we had in our lobby. This allowed those who couldn’t attend the show to still contribute their wishes,” she says.

Web technology has other advantages, says Christopher Terry, president and CEO of Canada’s Science and Technology Museum Corporation in Ottawa. “With a web site, you can use different groupings to show the evolution of some aspects of technology, as we did with aircraft at our aviation museum. This would be impossible on the actual museum floor.”

The possibilities are so captivating that museums everywhere are getting into the act. Nevertheless, museum officials insist that interactive museum visits neither conflict with, nor become a substitute for, in-person gallery-going.

“When we first started putting things on the web, there was a fear that people would stop coming to the museum. The opposite is true,” says John Gordy, head of digital media at the Freer/Stackler Galleries at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

Plan a museum itinerary for your travels

Museum web sites can be invaluable when planning a long trip or a short, spontaneous visit. Perusing these sites can help you find the best exhibitions from Toronto to Tokyo with up-to-date information about hours, admission rates and locations.

You may even discover that your family will have a more enjoyable and enriching museum experience if they virtually visit the museum first. “Art can be challenging for most people and if they know a little more before seeing it, they are more excited about it,” says Gordy.

Nothing could ever replace the wonder of visiting a great museum. Still, the Internet offers a world of unique experiences that shouldn’t be missed.

Explore virtual museum destinations

Here are some examples of online museums around the world — but take the time to discover your own when surfing on the web.

Culture, Heritage & Recreation Canada: museums across Canada
Tate Gallery: London, England
The Louvre: Paris, France
The Rijksmuseum: Amsterdam, Holland
The Prado Museum: Madrid, Spain
The State Hermitage Museum: St. Petersburg, Russia
Museum of Modern Art — Art Safari: New York, United States
Smithsonian Institution: Washington, D.C., United States Eternal Egypt: an interactive display of ancient Egypt from the Egyptian Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage