A new art medium for a new century? Not quite.
Internet-based art — work created and experienced on-line — has been around almost since the Net’s inception; a large body of artists is out there making it. What’s new is that important art museums in North America suddenly have sought to make everyone aware of a commitment to this proliferating — and problematical — form of cultural production.
In January, both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (in New York) appointed their first curators of media arts, who will be responsible for Web projects in addition to film and video.
SFMOMA concurrently established the Webby Prize for Excellence in On-line Art, which will give $50,000 annually for work on the Net, plus “e.space,” an on-line gallery (at sfmoma.org) for presenting its collection of Web projects as well as future commissions and exhibitions.
The Whitney also announced a show by contemporary Net artists for the fall, following the first representation of on-line art at the museum in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition, which opens on March 23.
This certainly sounds like a change has taken place at museums devoted to art of the modern and contemporary periods.
“I think it’s a matter of awareness rather than actual change,” says Benjamin Weil, media arts curator in San Francisco. “There have been a lot of interesting experiments until now that weren’t as noticed as they should have been. Given their groundbreaking nature, it’s interesting that they didn’t get much attention. Museums on-line didn’t get much attention before now. But there were four museums in the United States that started to have a serious interest in developing an on-line presence that went beyond the usual brochure-ware.” These museums are:
The DiaCenter for the Arts, in Manhattan, which began commissioning artists to work on the Web in 1995 (the projects may be viewed at diacenter.org).
SFMOMA, which since 1997 has acquired about 25 examples of Net art; collecting has ceased until the museum determines the best way to show them.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which in the late ’90s turned over its Web site (moca.org) to Yoko Ono, who temporarily recast it as a work of art.
The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, which at the end of 1998 founded a Digital Arts Study Center (walkerart.org) that accepted versions of Web projects from other sites to create what is probably the largest repository of on-line art in a North American museum.
Europe lags behind, with only half as many museums showing interest. The first is the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (kiasma.fi) in Finland, the country with the greatest number of people in Europe connected to the Net. The second is the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (fondation.cartier.fr) in Paris, which actively began acquiring works in 1999.
Interestingly, given the lag, the first museum exhibition of Net art occurred late last year not in the United States but Karlsruhe, Germany — where results were less than satisfactory.
“It was a very, very ambitious show,” says Weil. “It tried to be an exhaustive panorama of what was happening on-line when the show took place [September through December]. There were easily hundreds of artists. The attempt to show them was necessary. And the fact that a museum decided to turn itself into what looked like a trade show was bold. But I do not think that was the way to do it. We learned a huge lesson there: The museum is not a place where you are supposed to be looking at computers.”
Thus the first question for museums regarding on-line art — and it’s absolutely essential — is how to exhibit it.
“One of the problems is that, of course, the art is created for being viewed by anybody at any time from any point in the world as long as they have a network connection,” says Christiane Paul, media arts curator at the Whitney.
“So putting computer terminals in a museum doesn’t have any added value, except that you’re browsing the work in a public space, which is an experience in itself but not necessarily what the art has been created for.
“Some museums try to solve the problem by projecting the work, and a lot of artists have reservations about that, which I understand because ultimately it ends up being an experience like watching TV. For many [on-line] artists the objective was to circumvent the traditional museum system. They don’t want to be part of it at all. Others welcome it as an opportunity to expand to a larger audience. I believe it’s important to integrate on-line art into the museum system, but the best way has not yet been found.”
Wherever computers have been employed to show Net art in museums, there has been the same behavior: Viewers use the terminals to check their e-mail, as if they were trangressing against the artwork or museum. No institution has discovered a way to prevent it. So beyond the difficulty of providing an experience congenial to the work, museums are in the unprecedented position of having to find a way to confine viewers to what it is they presumably came to see.
Then there are the problems of collecting. Because the art is not bound up with the physical object, what constitutes ownership? When museums own pieces, unless they are isolated from the Net — detached like graffiti art becomes when it is taken from its city environment and created on canvas — they’re still available for everyone outside the museum, which goes against exclusivity, a key element of ownership. Merely to host the art at a museum Web site, as some have become set on doing, builds no economic system for on-line art, with no high prices paid for works that are paradoxically ubiquitous and fragile.
“Collecting is important,” says Paul, “because the Net is a very ephemeral medium. Some artworks created in the early years of the Net aren’t even viewable anymore with the latest browser versions. They were created for Netscape 3.0, for example, and you can’t experience them any longer. So collecting would basically mean that what you make available on your museum server is not only the work but also an old browser version for actually experiencing it. And at that point it gets tricky.”
As Weil says: “Do we collect everything? Do we collect machines? Or do we not? These questions are becoming some of the most important issues of the entire cultural form.”
No one has the answers. Net art has proliferated rapidly, but it’s basically only five years old. Even the vocabulary used to discuss it comes from other media, primarily radio or television. And discrimination among the different directions taken by on-line artists — some more cinematic, others more conceptual — has scarcely begun.
Both Paul and Weil are most interested in Net art that is self-reflexive, looking at topics exclusively in terms of the Web, such as the way the landscape is being fashioned by the software industry, or how we relate to the new electronic environment. About 200 artists worldwide have been recognized for working in that environment. Some of the better artists can be found at the Walker Study Center site or the exhibition space turbulence.org; beyond them,no one has yet determined the size of the on-line artists’ community or, for that matter, its audience.
Museums have a tendency to follow one another in who they exhibit, collect and promote. In terms of Net art, extra care should be taken to ensure all areas of creation continue to develop and not suffer the curtailment that already has led most commercial sites to look and function alike.
“It’s a huge area that we’re just opening a door onto,” says Weil. “We’re applying knowledge we have already, but at the same time are very aware of how our perception and understanding may be restricted if we rely too much on what we know.”
