List of World Famous Museums

While this list is certainly going to cause some people to throw up their hands and wonder what’s come to the world in terms of taste, this is a basic list of the museums that wow more people than they bore.

Whether a museum holds art, history, or some combination of the two, the museums that hold the pieces of the past are the ones that hold the greatest space in the memory of the world.

From the United States to Europe and Asia, these buildings certainly don’t contain all of the most famous art pieces, but they do contain the ones we can (mostly) name and identify by sight. (Or at least that’s what we tell people when we’re at snooty cocktail parties.)

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York, USA
• British Museum, London, England
• The Tate Museum, London, England
• The Vatican Museums, Rome, Italy
• Museu Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain
• The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia
• The Smithsonian, Washington, DC, USA
• MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), New York City, New York, USA
• The Ufizzi, Florence, Italy
• Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
• The Louvre, Paris, France
• Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York City, New York, USA
• Albertan Museum, Vienna, Austria
• National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA
• Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France
• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

You might have others to add to the list and you might have others that certainly have something to share with those who visit, but this is a list that hopefully continues to grow as the world continues to create new things.

While we might all be on the Internet more than we are in an art workshop, there are still creative people out there who are willing to put their ideas on canvas, in a sculpture, or in other mediums. And while there are still buildings to hold these treasures, we will continue to look at them.