MUSEUMS, CURATORS, AND ARTISTS FIND INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR SHOWING ART IN A PANDEMIC

Annie Armstrong

An employee walks next to Martin Desjardins’s Quatre Captifs in the Musee du Louvre, Paris, closed to the public indefinitely amid concerns on the COVID-19 outbreak, 2020. Photo by Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images.

We’re several weeks into the COVID-19 crisis, and by now, most art institutions worldwide have either already closed or are about to close for the indefinite future. As governments around the world are mandating businesses to close and group gatherings to disperse, galleries and artists are taking a hit without sales to be made, and museums are left without the ability to host events or sell tickets.

That’s not to say people aren’t getting industrious. Many institutions have turned to the vast potential of the internet to keep things ticking. One of the first to implement an online exhibition was the Beijing-based X Museum, which has postponed its opening but enlisted artist Pete Jiadong Qiang to create a gamified online museum experience.

“Online exhibitions will have their place in the future, and the epidemic accelerated the process,” the artist explained. “I would rather not have a specific boundary between online and offline, virtual and physical, especially for an emerging contemporary museum in Beijing.”

This trend hasn’t just come about in relation to the coronavirus, however. Google Arts & Culture has, for many years now, been compiling virtual tours of museums around the world. With Google Arts & Culture, you can tour over 500 art institutions worldwide, such as the Guggenheim, London’s National Gallery, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and many others.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-museums-curators-artists-find-innovative-solutions-showing-art-pandemic?utm_medium=email&utm_source=19784359-newsletter-editorial-daily-03-20-20&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-V