The art of tourism

This article offers two innovations. First it proposes a new method, “virtual curating”, which is an extension to methods (such as content analysis and discourse analysis) deployed to interrogate written texts. In this case the texts are works of art and virtual curating elaborates and evaluates a method for using these works to understand tourism. Second it mounts a virtual exhibition in tourism art distilled from the collection of around nine hundred works. It organizes the art into themes, or galleries, and offers a guide to the exhibition. The outcomes of the article are an innovative reading of, and fresh insights into both the phenomenon of tourism and its representation.