What is a Virtual Museum?
A real museum, like all buildings, rests on the ground in a particular space for a particular time. Its physical size limits how much of its collection can be on view at any one time. Typically, a major museum can only display a very small fraction of its holdings, although it can make the entire collection available on request to visitors who have special research interests.
A virtual museum has no such limits of space: it can display as many works as the size of the web server allows (this Virtual Museum’s web host, Squarespace, provides unlimited storage space spread across an array of Tier 3 data centers arcoss the United States). Furthermore, the virtual museum is not limited to the physical works in my collection. Virtual museum curator can gather images from the huge number of images available on the internet and display them in whatever fashion they choose.
The major missing ingredient of a virtual collection, of course, is the absence of the original works themselves. Everyone admits that standing in the presence of a real painting or sculpture has a kind of imaginative resonance that — at least so far — no virtual reproduction can match. And even though a good virtual image can closely match the color and content of the real work of art, a computer monitor, no matter how large, cannot reproduce on screen the impact of the size of the work. The School of Athens and the Iwo Jima monument in this virtual museum can reproduce the significance of the original, but not the full visual impact.
However, a virtual work can embody the major feature of every work of narrative art: its significance.
