– This post was written by Liam McGarry –
You’re molded to the couch, scrolling aimlessly on social media. Thumbing through your timelines, mouth ajar and eyes vacant, you finally reach the Instagram message of shame: “You’re all caught up, you’ve seen all new posts from the last two days.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. Social media is accused of sapping productivity, but it can be a force for good. It can be the inspiration needed to be creative at home. There’s more to life online than dogs eating ice cream and the bi-annual look at your ex’s Facebook profile.
Read on for social media activities that are loaded with culture vitamins, and guaranteed to get your keister off the couch!
Recreate famous artworks with Getty Museum
Nothing beats seeing your favorite work of art at the museum: The musty smell of the halls, the thrill of seeing centuries-old brushstrokes on canvas, the challenge of coming up with inappropriate memes for Renaissance paintings.
For a fun alternative, how about getting creative at home and becoming your favorite masterpiece?
The culture fiends running Getty Museum’s Twitter account suggested that its followers recreate well-known works of art using just the people and objects in their homes. Some of the submissions exhibited are as brilliant as the originals.
Take a look at their tweets for more inspiration, and come up with your own. Stuff your clothes to mimic the rotund glory of Botero. Organize your partner, children, and pets to recreate Rembrandt’s Nightwatch. Got a fruit bowl? You’d be surprised how many artists have drawn inspiration from their five-a-day!
If even these ideas don’t fill the museum-shaped hole in your life, check out 36 virtual museum tours you can enjoy from your couch.
Tiqets Homemade Museums
We’ve been racking our brains trying to find more ways to culture while museums and attractions are closed. We want to keep you inspired and creative while the world’s most remarkable venues are out of reach.
The eureka moment came when Tiqets’ social media gurus decided to club together with cultural Craigs and Catherines around the world to create a virtual pop-up museum. Until the doors to culture fling open again, we’re challenging you to get creative at home.
Every week over on Instagram we’re sharing your art, design and photography on the Tiqets story. Whether you’re a painter, a Photoshop whiz or a gritty street photographer, tag your work in #TiqetsHomemadeMuseum and we’ll share it with the world.
Try on our Cubist Instagram filter and be the pride-of-place artwork in your living room. If you need more inspiration, Instagram user Pigatss turned their entire home into a museum, complete with a guided tour and a cereal-box Van Gogh! Become a curator yourself!
There’s more culture-at-home content on the way. Follow Tiqets on Instagram and Twitter to find out more.
Free Online Classes with MoMA
If quarantine means you’ve found yourself with a lot more time on your hands, you’re probably thinking of ways to be productive at home. When you’ve exhausted all the Instagram art classes, and recreated every Renaissance masterpiece you can think of using only cooking utensils, it might be time to look for something with more long-term reward.
Ever asked yourself, What Is Contemporary Art? We’ve all been there: Looking at an acclaimed piece of art, head turned to one side, adamant that we could achieve the same effect by strapping paintbrushes to the cat’s paws.
Now’s the perfect time for some artistic education. New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has made a bunch of online courses available to budding creatives – for free. Join a community of fellow art students as you delve into the worlds of art, fashion, and photography with experts and detailed course materials.
Sign up and analyze over 70 works of art created since 1980, while learning about the processes and inspirations of the artists who brought them into the world.
Seeing Through Photography encourages you to think about how images are constructed, what makes them important, and how the process of bringing them to life gives them meaning. You’ll up your creative IQ and improve your Instagram game.
There are also courses on Modern Art & Ideas, Fashion as Design, and Postwar Abstract Painting for you to immerse yourself in.
If you’re looking for more ways to get involved with MoMA, @MoMAlearning on Twitter is providing daily creative activities for all ages and abilities to massage our frontal cortexes. That’s your brain’s creative hub, which goes to sleep while you’re watching videos of people falling over on YouTube.
Get creative at home and master the art of quarantine photography
You don’t need a fancy camera these days to delve into photography. Even your pocket-worn iPhone from 2011 can take a decent picture.
Museums and galleries are challenging their followers to find beauty in the mundane and the ordinary. Some are offering competitions and prizes, others just the satisfaction of seeing your efforts featured.
It’s not just humans who are spending a lot more time indoors. London’s Photographers’ Gallery created the #TPGHomeAlone hashtag and asked their community to capture powerful, poignant and darn cute snaps of their cats. Like we need an excuse!
The TPG team post regular home-photo challenges. Give them a follow and see what you can come up with.
LA’s Annenberg Space for Photography teamed up with Vanity Fair, setting its followers the challenge of replicating famous covers of the iconic pop-culture magazine.
Why not raid your wardrobe and become Barack Obama or Audrey Hepburn with a living room photo shoot? Just use #coversofcovers on Instagram.
The world-renowned Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam is setting weekly challenges for its users via their #FoamAtHome hashtag. Create your own versions of work by Dutch photographers.
Whether you want to join in the hashtag challenges or not, we task you with snapping something beautiful. Need some fuel to get creative at home? Check out Unsplash’s 20 things to shoot inside for the ultimate guide to home photography.
Join art demos with the Cartoon Art Museum
San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum is a non-profit educational museum dedicated to the colorful history of cartooning. What better way to level up during quarantine than to learn how to create and color your own neat stories?
You’re never too old for cartoons. If you’ve ever daydreamed the minutes away by doodling inky nothings on your notepad, you’ve already got the prior experience needed.
Over on the museum’s Facebook page and via Twitch you can follow along with demos, led by professional cartoonists, explaining everything from color theory to how best to draw trolls.
#VersionaThyssen
You want to recreate more iconic artworks? Well, that can be arranged. And with this social media challenge, there are prizes to be won!
The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid began the #VersionaThyssen initiative in 2019, asking culture lovers to mimic selected works from the museum’s collection. If you’re aged between 18 and 35, you’re invited to create pictures, illustrations, paintings, collages, animations, or anything else that you can exhibit via the #VersionaThyssen hashtag.
The best entries win prizes ranging from museum passes to €700 in cash. Now that’s much more rewarding than scrolling past pictures of your great aunt Susan’s dinner.
