Google Arts and Culture has been busy of late. They have a growing list of incredible galleries around the world who have enabled “streetview” style tours of their art. As you can imagine, this has some disadvantages over an actual tour of the art; it’s hard to read the labels of some pieces, it can feel a bit “clunky” to be leaping around trying to get to the right spot. But there are some amazing features too. The galleries are empty. You can go right up close and then stand far back and nobody will move you along. Artworks we will never see in real life are suddenly present in our home. We can see how enormous or how tiny they are (and some of them are really very different to the size we had thought)!
As an example, try The Uffizi in Florence. The page will first scroll through some descriptions and a guide to the gallery, then you can view selected pieces of art and find further descriptions of them.
The National Gallery of Art in the USA holds a wide variety of information about art and artists. It also has some kids’ resources such as an app for them to explore art and create some of their own.
Similarly, The Met has some really impressive tours of some areas of its galleries, along with further access via Google technology. It also has a dedicated kids area which has videos which include exploration of art, craft ideas, a virtual (art) time machine and an interactive map of the gallery.
