I can look at Michelangelo’s David on my laptop – are museums and art galleries still relevant?

People are quick to foretell the end of things, from the prophets of old warning of the end of the world to US politicial scientist Francis Fukuyama’s more optimistic prognosis of the end of history after the Cold War.

Today, they have an equally hasty modern counterpart: those who have seen it fit to declare the death of analogue in all its forms.

Whether it is vinyl, the cinema or museums and galleries, the threat of the digital to old forms of consumption has been oft-cited. Yet, it has not really had a corresponding effect on the real world, where most people still prefer to live.

With doors to museums and galleries flung open again after the pandemic interregnum, the usual crowds making pilgrimages to these institutions have returned.

Rather than people eschewing these spaces for a more “digital” experience, the more potent challenges now come from more voices clamouring to be included in the narrative, and calls to restore artefacts to their rightful points of origin.

At its root, much of the enduring appeal of museums and galleries has to do with how irreplaceable tangible objects are. Downloading a photo of the Sahara desert, for instance, cannot be compared with standing atop its sand dunes; instead, there is an easy case to be made that the former is a catalyst for the latter.

In the same way, the unique collections of the best museums and galleries – and their marketing online – continue to draw in-person visitors to pay tribute. This is especially the case for art visits, with no number of Google images sufficiently preparing one for a face-to-face encounter.

Sculpted in the 1500s, Michelangelo’s marble David in Florence’s Accademia Gallery continues to wow visitors, not least with its height at 5.17m – a dimension not easily translated on screen. But it is also marvellous in its artistry: The translucence of David’s marble veins, viewed up close, remains one of the greatest artistic encounters.

This same visceral experience can also happen with historical artefacts in museums. There is nothing like looking at the thousands of pairs of shoes piled together in Auschwitz in Poland, worn by children before they were murdered in gas chambers, to leave one gripped by the horrific evil of the Holocaust.

In each instance, there is an emotional register elicited only because the person is standing there, face to face with these objects that he or she might have read about. Hence, repositories, museums and galleries are uniquely placed to welcome generation after generation to visit and feel – and so never forget.

Admittedly, not all items within museums and galleries have this effect on people, and for each Rosetta Stone, there are many more common items of history: a relatively nondescript mummy, or an old uniform featuring a now-obsolete coat of arms.

Still, with good curation, they have the potential to transport visitors to another time and place through the sheer mass of material culture.

In many ways, the strength of the museum and gallery lies not in their individual artefacts, but in the entirety of their collections, together constituting a place for spontaneous encounters with unknown history and art. This is backed up by teams of expert researchers, specialists and curators who spend entire careers making sure that items important to that field are recovered, conserved and then made available in a publicly accessible way.

Particularly good in this respect is Singapore’s freshly reopened Peranakan Museum, which arranges items such as jewellery, batik and furniture by type. While each individual item may be forgettable, together they allow visitors to immerse themselves in the daily rhythms of a well-off Peranakan household.

In Oxford, Britain, the Pitt Rivers Museum has a similar curatorial strategy, applied to a more international range of curios. Comprising more than 500,000 objects, many of ritual significance, the museum has also chosen to organise them by type, with few accompanying labels.

Shields from cultures around the world, for instance, are put together in close proximity, providing a concentrated dose of global cultural education and anthropological wonder.

Without prior interests in shields, one still comes away with an expanded sense of the aesthetically possible and a more cross-cultural way of thinking about the objects that one interacts with every day.

Museums 2.0

These fundamental attractions of museums and galleries aside, the traditional impression of these spaces as stodgy, stale-aired and boring affairs is becoming increasingly outmoded. Every museum saw the need to modernise during Covid-19, and many have been experimenting with integrating their physical offerings with newer digital ones.

Compared with a decade ago, museums and galleries now have a much larger digital footprint, with social media accounts and online publicity campaigns. Britain’s The Black Country Living Museum’s TikTok campaign in 2020, where its actors played out snippets of life from Britain’s industrial past, went viral on the video-sharing platform and helped it gain well over 300,000 followers.

Located near Birmingham, it was already an open museum on former industrial land where visitors could walk around and interact with actors. Its success lay in the museum sets that acted as the perfect backdrop for the videos, and the knowledgeable and well-rehearsed actors – speaking in the milieu-appropriate slang – that were the culmination of the museum’s work since it opened its doors in 1978.

More importantly, the spaces in museums have themselves evolved beyond just artefacts accompanied by text. Multimedia elements have been incorporated into presentations, and exhibitions now place a greater emphasis on being experiential.

Now on at the ArtScience Museum is the travelling exhibition Sensory Odyssey, which features clips shot in 8K resolution and on location around the world. Beamed on panoramic screens, they conjure up seven hyper-realistic and immersive ecosystems, from life-size whales dancing their aquatic ballet in Mauritian waters to the glaciers of Greenland, as scents curated by perfumer International Flavors & Fragrances evoke the smell of the ocean and the Arctic.

South Korean Jeju Island’s Arte Museum, a remodelled factory, is also state of the art in such multimedia presentation. On all-enveloping 10m-high projection walls, canonical works of art have been recreated and animated in painstaking detail, down to individual brush strokes.

With these beamed even onto the floor visitors are standing on, entering the space feels like stepping into a Van Gogh painting.

The modern museum and gallery find novel ways of convincing audiences that history and art are never static – even as they encourage visitors to take an Instagram selfie.

Controversies that improve

Yet, the refreshing of museums and galleries’ content lies beyond the aesthetic. Just as they are buffeted by the digital wave, these institutions now also exist in a new pluralistic and more decolonised world than when most of them were set up.

Powerful voices in various communities have found it necessary to ask questions of the kinds of stories museums and galleries choose to tell. The finite space of museums has always meant that certain narratives are centred and others marginalised, with power dynamics usually leading to female or ethnic-minority perspectives being sidelined.

Exhibitions have thus become fruitful sites of contestation. When the National Gallery in London announced its recent summer exhibition After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, pitching it as a celebration of the “towering achievements of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gaugin and Rodin”, many asked where the women were.

It prompted the gallery to reply that major works by female artists would be announced closer to the opening, even as it confirmed that French sculptor Camille Claudel’s Imploration would be part of the show.

Similarly, it was the sense that black history had been underrepresented in United States institutions that led to the formation of a new museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC in 2016.

It is the first federally owned museum in the US, and the world’s largest, devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history and culture.

This demand for inclusivity has taken on a trans-national character too, with former colonised countries asking for the return of artefacts from places like the British Museum, with its bronzes from the West African kingdom of Benin and stone moai (megalithic statues) from Easter Island.

In 2022, the British Museum agreed to return 70 artefacts that were proven to have been forcibly taken more than 100 years ago from Nigeria. It represented an important moment of reckoning for European museums of this ilk that have long prided themselves on their trove of treasures.

Rather than weakening museums and galleries, such challenges reaffirm their importance as sites of education and power, even as former colonies have set up their own museums and galleries to wrest back the right and ability to tell their own stories.

They prove that any institution purporting to tell a story has a responsibility to broaden its horizons to be more inclusive, and make sure that its telling is ethical, possibly charting the path for a more equal distribution of artefacts in the longer term.

Sometimes, this rethinking extends to society’s values, too. The travelling Museum of Failure, which features a collection of failed products, opened in Sweden in 2017. Including Colgate Lasagne and Bic’s “For her” pens, it critiqued society’s obsession with success while becoming that most lusted after thing in a digital age: a talking point.

And that is what the potential of museums and galleries ultimately is. Through real objects, situated in their rightful context, they force you to slow down, learn something new and rethink what you and society hold to be important. Technology has only given them more ways to do this better.