PrintIt’s 11 PM the night before your Art Hum paper is due, and you never managed to make it to the Met to actually see the piece you’re writing about. You’re starting to panic when you glance at your computer—and a metaphorical lightbulb turns on.
Today, students can do everything on the Internet: research, shopping, dating, even museum-going. Every major museum in New York hosts its own comprehensive Web site with complete digital collections and descriptions of their exhibits. In other words, if you can move a mouse and click a button, you can visit a museum in as long as it takes you to connect to the Columbia University network.
The Internet has brought art to a much wider audience, giving people who don’t normally visit museums the opportunity to explore the art world easily and affordably. Even for those who do have the chance to see art in the flesh, the Internet still seems like the better option—especially for Columbia students who have little time for a leisurely afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art.
But while students are staring bug-eyed at a computer screen, how are museums dealing with the stark possibility that visitors will choose the Web over their institutions? Alexander Alberro, art history professor at Barnard, says the Internet has forced the museum to do something different. Prior to the Internet, textual information was located along side each artwork and museum shows were presented in a linear fashion.
Now many exhibits are giving visitors a more interactive experience. Instead of only placing artworks chronologically, curators set up exhibitions in a random order so that museum-goers feel like they have more freedom to move about the gallery without being directed by wall texts or historical information.
“Genuinely, people like choice,” says Alberro. Museums have become like a real live search engine: just as web surfers can open up any window on the Internet, museum visitors can control their experience of the exhibit. The museums are “windows of flexibility,” argues Alberro. By eliminating wall text, art institutions encourage visitors to go online if they are interested in learning more about what they’ve seen.
Columbia’s own museum—the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery—has participated in a similar type of restructuring. Rather than guiding visitors through the exhibit, Wallach offers multiple rooms with no sequential order, allowing viewers to acquire new knowledge in a their own way. Dina Georgas, a Barnard junior, notes that the current New Acropolis Museum Exhibition at Wallach does not present the construction of the Acropolis Museum in a chronological order, but is instead “organized into ‘art historical snapshots’ that explain the archaeological, academic, and social significance of the Acropolis in the modern world stage.”
While museums cater to the web-savvy audience, the Internet may in fact be pushing more people to go to museums in search of authenticity. “The reason people go to museums is because of the internet,” says Alberro. “We don’t trust the online images. People go to museums because there you have the work—it’s the real thing.”
The Internet has not diluted the novelty of seeing masterpieces in person. Some works necessitate a visitor’s physical presence if she is to truly appreciate the nuances of the artwork. Many of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, such as “Full Fathom Five,” also contain various objects—cigarette butts, nails, pennies—that cannot be detected on a computer screen no matter how hard one squints.
“When you look at things online, you’re not in the right atmosphere to really appreciate them,” says Elizabeth Bibi, a Barnard junior.
Even though the Internet produces somewhat faulty reproductions of the real image, a new form of art has emerged that depends solely on the Web and the public that interacts with it. Net Art, developed in the early 1990s in Eastern Europe, started as an egalitarian, communal form of art production in which the public is an active participant in its creation and dissemination.
Joachim Blank, a famous net artist, says Net Art “often deals with structural concepts: A group or an individual designs a system that can be expanded by other people.” These projects then become virtual communities that rely on a “constant give and take” of members. Net Art allows web users to essentially curate their own exhibits and facilitate in the art making process.
For example, Teleportacia.org, a Net Art project, gives users the choice to click any number of sidebar options. “Bora Bora” leads users to a page with palm trees and other possible choices. From there, clicking on “Europa” results in a series of nude photographs from the turn of the century. By choosing what to click on, viewers discover the art and thereby bring it into existence. Just as museums have given over some of their authority to the public, Net Art also gives people more control over the process of creating art as well as viewing it.
Although students may choose to use the Internet in order to bypass museums, the Web proposes a whole new art experience that cannot be found in an institution. Now students can explore a part of the art world that truly belongs to them. While the museum has a limited amount of choice, the Internet offers infinite possibilities.