On July 31, the virtual world gets a reality show when a team from the Exploratorium, the noted science museum based in San Francisco, travels to remote Xinjiang Province in Northwestern China, close to the Mongolian border, to stream a real, total solar eclipse into the 3D world and online community known as Second Life:

An exhibition by the internationally renowned photographer Harry Benson has opened at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. This exciting homecoming exhibition of his work is designed to be a definitive retrospective of his 60 year career and will run through Sunday 14 September.

An exhibition celebrating this year’s centenary of rugby league, League of Legends: 100 years of Rugby League in Australia, opens at the Powerhouse Museum on 5 September.

Through the display of objects from a wide geographic area encompassing Africa, West Asia and Central Asia, Timbuktu to Tibet explores the central role that textiles have played in many disparate cultures across several continents.

In Focus: The Landscape, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center, August 26, 2008–January 11, 2009, offers an overview of the history of landscape photography from the dawn of the medium to the 20th century.

The second part of the Hirshhorn’s two-part exploration of contemporary moving-image art, “Realisms,” looks at a decade of work that demonstrates how cinema-now encompassing such related moving-image media as television, home video and digital entertainment-is a pervasive artistic and social language that complicates rather than clarifies the relationship between fiction and reality.

A selection of portraits and sculpture by European masters dating from the Renaissance to the 20th century will grace the Coolidge Gallery in the Upper Hemicycle at the MFA in the special installation, Great Company: Portraits by European Masters. This display includes six paintings and two sculptures, representing some of the finest European works from the MFA’s collection.

Each year, as the days get longer and the weather warmer, people everywhere welcome summer and its charms. For many artists, summer offers an opportunity to concentrate fully on their work without the constraints of teaching or the distractions of urban life.

If a maker of Adirondack rustic collaborated with a contemporary world-class architect, what would the final product be? A blend of the past and the future, certainly. A fusion of the traditional and cutting-edge – perhaps.

Indiana Jones is at it again, in Steven Spielberg’s latest archaeological adventure, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Sydney, Australia: The Museum of Contemporary Art will celebrate the dynamism and depth of Australian video art with a new exhibition Video Logic.

The Oakland Museum of California presents a selective look at the vast and vibrant Southern California art scene via 11 influential artists, in L.A. PAINT. The exhibition opens October 4, 2008 and continues through March 15, 2009.