In times of adversity, we look to art to give form to chaos. But where do you go when the chaos keeps you from art entirely? It will have to be online. As the coronavirus pandemic stretches into yet another month, keeping arts institutions closed across the globe, museums’ websites are now posting traffic numbers that were once unimaginable.

The Musée du Louvre in Paris has reported a tenfold increase in web traffic, from 40,000 to 400,000 visitors per day. Visits to the websites of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London are also up by huge multiples. Audiences are seeking out arts material for children — the Metropolitan Museum of Art reports an elevenfold uptick to #MetKids, its youth education initiative. Remember just a decade ago, when the Met raised hackles, within and beyond its walls, for its ambitious digitization initiative, as if it were dangerous to offer more than 400,000 high-resolution, free-to-download images of the collection? No one’s saying that now.

Should a museum aim to replicate online the exact experience of visiting in person the world’s great picture galleries and palaces? They’ve been trying for two decades, and the pictures have certainly gotten crisper. In too many cases, virtual museum walk-throughs remain unwieldy, with herky-jerky navigation. Often information is out of date. And there’s no coffee!

The truth is that a museum’s digital assets can’t duplicate its brick-and-mortar presence — and the best of them, the ones I’ve selected here, do not try. Rather, they regard a museum’s physical and digital activities as complementary platforms of a single mission. They take the ambition and intelligence and public commitment they bring to the galleries, and feed it into new channels onscreen.