So, I got a Luxembourg Pass and spent eight hours visiting a traditional archeology museum, a lovely photo exhibition, an unsurprisingly ridiculous museum of modern art, and finally the impressively immersive museum of Luxembourg City history.

Unlike ‘tourism,’ this was a successful experience. By the end of the day, it felt like I had been watching a movie the whole time (that’s my immersion metric).

I will visit more museums. But I still stand by my initial judgement: museums would be unregrettably outdated if they can’t justify ‘physical proximity.’ You go to a museum and you can’t touch anything. So what makes it necessary when you can see the same object or piece of art online, from the comfort of your home? And if online and virtual museums are pushed forward and promoted as much as the concept deserves, you could rotate the object, inspect it from every angle, perhaps even ‘touch’ it, and at the same time watch a clip of the artefact being used or created, all through good 3D or XR interfaces.
So, if museums want to compete with this prospect and remain relevant, they have to invest in creating ever more immersive experience, taking advantage of physical space, and the few remaining modalities that hi-tech has yet to unlock on a commercial scale, like olfaction.

PS. The pictures at the photo exhibition were amazing, but my oh my, the captions were literary masterpiece of humor in their own right.