10 Art-History things you can do without leaving your house!
So, you’re bored in quarantine, or maybe they closed your favorite museum. The COVID-19 outbreak has us all wondering what to do. If, like us, you turn to art history in anxious times, you can use this Art Guide to Quarantine to fill your time with a bit of beauty.
DailyArt’s Art Guide to Quarantine
1. Start your day right with the DailyArt app
It’s basically a small museum in your pocket. This simple app showcases a different artwork each day, and might very soon become your favorite morning notification. Available for Android and iPhone, DailyArt has educational descriptions written by art-historians translated into 13 languages.
Pro tip? Use the “Archive” and “Favourite” option to create your own, personal art gallery.
2. Subscribe to the DailyArt Magazine
Yours and faithful! There’s so much to read. Discover our Painting of the Week, Women Artists archive… or get lost in WTF Art History (there are cats!).
3. Have a walk around MET or visit Taj Mahal… virtually
If you miss visiting a particular place you can use Google’s Streetview option to walk through the halls of your favorite museum. Or you can go to the Taj Mahal. Or Pompeii. The Rijksmuseum? The options are endless and you’ll also even find archives of already closed exhibitions. No queues, no tall people hovering in front of paintings. We could get used to this.
The recently closed MET Museum has a very similar program, with six immersive videos in the 360° technique.
If you have virtual reality equipment you can go for a short trip to Versailles.
4. Find your new favorite artworks in an online gallery
Aside from the already mentioned DailyArt App and the Google Arts & Culture project, you can find and curate your favorite pieces in:
- Europeana — an amazing source for all European cultural heritage. It might be a useful link to pin for graphics and social media managers as it has a special catalog of Free Re-use images.
- Curiator is a collaborative project based on user-contributed art, so it might be a great place to find out about lesser-known names.
- And finally, for those crazy about medieval manuscripts, you’ll find a huge digitized collection on DMMapp by Sexy Codicology.
5. Experiment with Art
Shadow art, collage, poem-portraits… Co-created by artists and coders, Google Arts & Culture experiments will be a never-ending source of fun.
Check out Google Arts Experiments.
6. Listen to podcasts
If you live with your headphones on, you might enjoy some of the more popular art podcasts.
The Art History Babes are basically friends that sip wine and discuss culture, and isn’t that what we all need sometimes? You can find them on Spotify or on their website.
If you’re into unique finds, you’ll love ArtCurious and Jennifer Dasal’s commentary on juicy stories in art history.
7. Study Art History
I especially like Smarthistory’s youtube videos – like this one about Elisabeth Vigee le Brun: (if you like this artist, you might want to check our painting of the week!). Smarthistory works in cooperation with Khan Academy, and is currently one of the best online courses available.
The Stadel Course of Modern Art is more of an appreciation course, where you’ll learn how to look at over 200 modern masterworks. It’s free of charge and based on easy, interactive modules.
8. Become a critic of AI-art
It’s said to be the newest big genre in art. 9gans is an online art gallery consisting of pieces generated by Artificial Intelligence. It refreshes every hour, which means that every image is unique and most likely won’t appear again.
9. Check out some good news-art channels
Some of my personal favorites are be:
- Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings. I honestly couldn’t describe this website better than the writer did herself — “(…) search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tentacles of human thought and feeling.”
- Hyperallergic, one of the best sources for contemporary art content. Podcast, reviews, they have it all.
- And again, don’t forget about DailyArt Magazine 🙂
For quick tidbits and lots of visual inspiration, you won’t find a better place than Instagram and Twitter.
10. And if all else fails… Create!
You don’t need a professional canvas to be an artist. Listen to these words of advice by Ralph Waldo Emerson — “Every artist was first an amateur” — and start creating! Find your feelings and your style, and who knows, we might feature you one day.
If you enjoyed reading DailyArt’s Art Guide to Quarantine, here’s a full list of our “Lockdown” home entertainment articles. Stay safe and #Stayhome!
7 Entertaining Art History Podcasts to Listen to
10 Best Movies Related to Art for Time Spent in Quarantine
The Best Art Videos for the Age of Quarantine
The Best of the Best Museums to Visit Virtually on Lockdown (Constantly Updated)
Lockdown Artsy Entertainment Toolkit
Virtual Art Repositories – Explore Endless Artworks from Quarantine
Theatre Plays, Opera and Music Online to Keep you Entertained During Lockdown
15 Artsy Books To Read During Self-Quarantine
What to Do with Your Time when in Quarantine? Tips from Art!
