Art and Design in the Digital Space

Refik Anadol’s digital display at MoMA, December 2022

Have you ever walked past a piece of art that pulled you in and made you linger? That pull is difficult to replicate online.

And yet the pressure to try has never been greater. Museums, galleries and individual artists are no longer asking whether to go digital. They are asking whether their digital presence does anything a well-designed brochure can’t.

For designers and content professionals working in or near the cultural sector, that question has a direct professional answer, and it is more specific than “build a better website” or “create content that converts”.

When the doors closed

The Covid-19 pandemic forced the issue with particular bluntness. When museums and galleries closed in early 2020, the question was no longer whether to go digital but how fast and how well. Many museums and galleries had already begun to integrate digital platforms, but many more saw that process dramatically accelerated by the global health crisis.

The Courtauld Gallery’s virtual tour, launched in 2009, had attracted just under 9,000 visits in the prior year. In March 2020 alone, during lockdown, that number jumped to 14,600.

Demand was real. The question was whether supply could meet it with any integrity and whether traditional museums would embrace the new approach.

Many did, but the commercial art world moved even more quickly.

The market’s rapid pivot

David Zwirner in New York had introduced the first commercial gallery Online Viewing Room (OVR) in 2017. Its director of online sales, Elena Soboleva, described the online space as a core element of programming.

Art Basel Hong Kong fast-tracked its OVRs after the physical fair’s cancellation in February 2020. In total, 235 galleries (around 95 percent of the original roster) showed more than 2,000 works valued at $270 million.

For galleries that had invested early, the crisis vindicated the strategy. For those who hadn’t, it was a reckoning. While commercial galleries used OVRs to drive immediate sales, museums used their digital spaces to secure survival, expand global access and overhaul public engagement.

According to the Association of Science and Technology Centers’ report, Museum Digital Engagement: Before, During and Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic, institutions that invested heavily in digital came out significantly ahead.

Galleries now operate a hybrid marketplace, pairing strong digital outreach with selective physical pop-ups. While general virtual walkthroughs are usually free, museums successfully monetize the backend. They bundle digital viewing spaces with paid online workshops, virtual summer camps and exclusive lecture series.

But most importantly, curated digital storytelling persisted: Instead of replicating physical rooms, museums pivoted to high-density digital archives and microsites. They offer deep-dive historical context that physical museum visits cannot match.

Exhibition or website?

The commercial urgency of 2020 and its aftermath is only part of the story. The more durable question is what the digital space can actually do for art beyond moving inventory and what it cannot do at all.

A poorly designed virtual tour is not a digital museum. It is a PDF of a wall label dressed in interface design.

New York’s Cooper Hewitt makes the distinction concrete. In March 2020, just two days before the museum was due to open a major exhibition on the designer Willi Smith, Covid-19 forced its closure. The physical exhibition never opened as planned, but the digital archive did, raising a pointed question: What distinguishes a digital exhibition from a mere website?

That question has no clean answer. Institutions that pretend otherwise tend to produce disappointing digital experiences.

The tension between physical and digital is not, however, a zero-sum argument, and the institutions that have navigated it best are the ones that stopped asking “how do we put our collection online?” and started asking ”what can the digital space offer that the physical cannot?”

A New York Times analysis published in May 2021 offered concrete proposals for museums in the post-pandemic period, including the call to build genuine digital strategies rather than treating online content as a crisis measure, to syndicate collections across institutions and treat digital not as a substitute for the physical visit but as a parallel and complementary mode of engagement.

Two projects, two answers

Two current projects illustrate what a more considered approach can look like. Wifärt gallery in Hackney, East London, describes itself as the world’s first Wi-Fi art gallery. Members of the public submit drawings in exchange for access to the gallery’s wireless network. Each submission is assigned a title and curatorial note and celebrated online. The concept is deliberately low-tech, participatory and anchored to a specific place, even as it operates digitally.

Wifärt inverts the gallery model: instead of the institution selecting the art, the audience makes it.

Anthropeum uses a different tactic: it’s a daily game that challenges participants’ understanding of human cultures through ten objects spanning 5,000 years of history, asking players to guess where and when each artifact was made.

An installation at the Museum of Art in São Paulo

This interactive approach makes cultural knowledge feel like something you can test and build, not just receive, and empowers you to take part in the conversation. That’s what makes it different from a museum label.

Neither project pretends to replace the museum. Both use digital space to do what the physical institution cannot and add a layer to the experience.

This interdisciplinary, cross-sectional approach, introduced by digital methods, has also affected how curators arrange physical collections, signaling a shift from digital-native projects to digital thinking feeding back into physical curation.

MoMA in New York introduced an example of this shifting mindset in 2019, following its major renovation. The museum rearranged its collection galleries (e.g., 1880-1950 on the 5th floor) into thematic cross-sections of art, moving away from the “-isms” and strictly geographical or chronological presentation toward a dialogue among artists across genres, grouped by core themes. “French Landscapes and Interiors”, for example, places Cézanne next to Art Deco glass vases and silent black-and-white movie clips.

The museum also offers a vast online catalog that can be searched by artists, type or themes. Its evolving collection contains almost 200,000 works of modern and contemporary art, and more than 106,000 works are currently available online.

Other examples of this shifting mindset toward digital spheres include Tate Modern’s thematic, idea-driven rehang in 2000; the Rijksmuseum’s online collection with over 800,000 high-resolution images released in 2024; and the Smithsonian’s open-access digitization, which unlocked more than 5.1 million 2D and 3D digital items in 2020.

These virtual records also preserve the logic underlying a collection’s assembly and provide a clear provenance record.

The harder question gets personal

Many virtual museum tours are slide shows with better graphic design. The ones that fare better ask harder questions: what does an audience want to do with art when they can’t stand in front of it? And is flashier always better?

These questions get personal for me. My parents were artists, my father a sculptor and my mother a graphic artist, and I practically grew up in metal-casting foundries, galleries and museums.

Physical art spaces are my sanctuary, where I can slow down and be left alone with my thoughts.

But Van Gogh- or Michelangelo-inspired LED rooms that digitally reproduce and rotate their works on huge, high-resolution screens (including the ceiling and floor), with added soothing surround sound, take away that serenity. They can be fun, but they easily turn into an Instagrammable circus show.

I want to resist the impulse to get a quick, sensory fix. I want to see the original works of art first, linger and absorb, take my time and only then, maybe, add the LED thrill.

The digital should not become an automatic replacement for the physical and tangible. It may be an addition to the “real thing”, but for many, it has become the only option for enjoyment within their attention span.

That said, digital museums have become powerful equalizers, the primary point of access for all, and are now far ahead in accessibility compliance. Virtual spaces have allowed museums to build permanent interfaces for low-vision, hard-of-hearing, or physically disabled communities.

What this means for your work

Peter Weibel, the late director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, argued that museums need to become better versions of Netflix by recognizing that digital audiences expect access, depth and interactivity, not a reproduction of the printed catalog.

For designers and content professionals, these practical implications are clear. You don’t want to emulate the flashy for its own sake, but to incorporate a digital interactive mindset, which often requires a bottom-up approach.

But our new AI reality also raises red flags: “A physical museum’s authority partly derives from its responsibility for the objects themselves”, writes Shirley M. Mueller in Psychology Today (February 2026). “In a virtual setting, especially one run by individuals or small groups, viewers may find it harder to judge whether an image is an accurate, faithful representation or a loosely sourced picture with incomplete information. Clear documentation, provenance notes and transparent labeling help, but skepticism remains a reasonable response.”

So, a good digital content strategy not only expands a walled institution’s reach and diligently verifies its online catalog but also offers real conversations that art institutions often shy away from. Thematic curation prioritizes dialogue over taxonomy and stresses inclusivity, connections and the sharing of academic ideas.

This is where content creators come in, and most are already working this way:

As writers and editors, we seek clear communication strategies that engage our audience directly and sincerely and offer well-researched, verified content.

As designers, we embrace a community focus, inclusivity and accessibility to ensure user engagement and reach.

And as localization experts, we strengthen global cultural connections and adapt content across linguistic and cultural borders (e.g., cultural framing, image selection, interpretive register) in ways no algorithm currently replicates.

A museum’s website should not merely reproduce what’s on its walls, but explore new angles that physical spaces can’t capture, like wonder, reflection and ungated knowledge sharing.

Professional content creators can help shape well-designed digital experiences that introduce art to everyone, near and far, or to those who never set foot in a museum. These digital experiences turn passive viewing into active participation, connect people across institutions and are worth the visit in their own right.

Storytelling and finding connections are at its core. So, writers and creative thinkers who find patterns, group thoughts, ask questions, listen to answers, draw conclusions and encourage dialogue are needed more than ever.

“This new way of storytelling is a huge aspirational shift away from the polemic, what visitors should see and learn in the museum”, says Bevin Savage Yamazaki, co-leader for Gensler’s Culture & Museums practice, in a 2024 interview on the company’s website. “[It focuses] on authentic storytelling that encourages you to chart your own path or discovery experience in the space.”

The analog and the digital in the creative arts are different registers of the same conversation, about what art is for, for whom, and who gets a say. As a creative content professional, you don’t want to simulate the physical experience and replicate it online; rather, you want to create and curate dynamic content that enables new, accessible approaches to creativity for all.

Sometimes an immersive LED show featuring Van Gogh’s works or a visit to a performing arts space with virtual- or augmented reality headsets is exactly what your audience needs.

And sometimes, it’s not.

More on the topic:

Discover Art From 22 Museums. All In One Place
The Last Museum: Search across 6,308,174 artworks