The Museum in Quarantine: Architecture, Experience and the Virtual Museum

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in early 2020, were felt across all industries and public institutions, including art museums. Shuttered art museums sought to maintain public interest in their collections and exhibitions by promoting existing online tools, such as the virtual art museum tours hosted by Google Arts & Culture. This article analyses these tours from the perspective of museology and architecture and argues that, rather than a form of virtual reality, these tours are a peculiar kind of image database. As such, they are part of Google’s growing efforts towards mass digitization and data accumulation.