As the business world merges with the Internet community, corporate art departments are taking their first steps into online presentation styles and techniques. In addition, we are seeing thoughtfully created galleries of art work presented by corporation s. This trend appears to signal an unabashed return to acknowledging the importance of the arts by private enterprise, at a time when public support wavers thanks to uncertainty and political wrangling. Public art still has the greatest presence and impac t on the Internet, and art on the Internet is coming of age as the technology catches up to the artists" visions.
A prime example of the changing face of corporate creativity, as expressed through the new medium we call the Internet, can be found at http://www.chiatday.com/web, the Web site for Chiat/Day, the advertising agen cy best known for its kaleidoscopic Fruitopia campaign and its office without walls. Those of you with graphical browsers will love the imagery. The colors are vivid primaries and the shapes are soft and playful. Even the way objects are positioned on-scr een is atypical.
Non-graphically equipped users are not neglected. In fact, GUI users might want to turn off imagery so they can bounce around easily through a maze of thought-provoking descriptions of Chiat/Day's philosophical approach to marketing. Participatory forums and surveys pose some worthwhile questions. And to top it off, there is a virtual art gallery where excellent high-resolution imagery is achieved with relatively few kilobytes. Chiat/Day's site is memorable not so much for its content but for its bright o utlook and straightforward attitude.
I think Andy Warhol would have loved the possibilities of the layered interlaced images made popular by Web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape Navigator. In any case, a tour of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (at http://www.warhol.org/warhol) is the next best thing to being there. It begins with a photo of the elaborate doorway. From the main entrance you can choose to visit one of seven floors devoted to different periods in the life of one of this centu ry's most influential and controversial artists.
Each floor presents you with a floor plan, a representative work, and a catalog of the galleries and works on display. The sixth floor, for example, is named "Success, the 1950s" and opens with some of the famous multiple images of Marilyn Monroe, whi ch can be downloaded.
You can follow the tour from gallery to gallery or browse the collection of images. The Pittsburgh museum is duplicated down to the coffee shop in the basement, which is aptly named "The Underground." Along with an events calendar, film schedule, and map of how to reach the museum, there is a gift shop with items you can browse and order via a downloadable form. A generous feature of the Warhol Museum's Web site is its links to other museums and collections. Included with a well-organized menu of specific links are a series of Web robots optimized for searching art museums. Fluxus (at http://www.panix.com/ fluxus) is a post-Dada-inspired online installation mounted by a group of collaborators who include the prolific video artist Nam Jun Paik. Be prepared for some kilobyte-intensive imagery as the opening page presents a huge colorful image map of a gam e board with a wheel of choices. Clickable selections on the wheel include video, poetry, collage, installation, sculpture, photography--and that's just half of them. Even clicking on the border of the game board is amusing. When you enter any area, sever al artists" installations with photos, sound, and video can be viewed or downloaded from this worldwide virtual exhibition.
Each artist in some way incorporates technology, multimedia, or networking in their work. The works are cross-referenced by genre, artist, sense, and a category called "no-sense." What we are seeing at this site is the legacy of SeOUL-NYmAX: A Celebration of Art Without Borders, a Korean and American collaborative event from November 1994. Here the Internet has become a vehicle not only for visiting people and sites that are geographically distant, but for visiting events that can no longer be accessed in real time.
A more generalized virtual gallery is Art on the Net, at http://www.art.net. In its infancy last fall, it is now a vibrant resource and community for online artists and art enthusiasts. Central to Art on the Net are its st udios and galleries, which are Web areas available for artists to display their work either on Art on the Net's server or by a link to other servers.
The result is an interesting array of connections to other virtual galleries and to the exhibitions mounted within Art on the Net with the assistance of its Webmasters. Artist studio areas cover the visual arts, music, video, and other genres, including a future category called hacker's art. Art on the Net is open to suggestions and it is possible to design a space or a theme for a show.
The idea of virtual galleries and participatory art is not entirely new. OTIS/Synergy (at http://sunsite.unc.edu/ otis/otis.html), one of the first online collaborative galleries, continues to break ground with events such as its recent PANIC, a real-time, fast-access interactive art project. Many others sites, such as Kaleidospace at http://kspace.com, which has a commercial component, and even my own fledgling Art-O-Mat at http://www.panix.com/kgreenb/artomat, have set up group online shows.
Art on the Net, by virtue of its visibility and openness to submissions and ideas from artists, is the best bet as a front-runner in this field. Art on the Net also has generous links to other resource areas. Distinguished by rambling not-so-well-ordered lists, this server has led me to try many sites I had missed or passed over on other servers. A small current-events area has deadlines and other listings of interest to working artists.
It's great to see the venerable Fine Art Forum newsletter in its present incarnation as Fine Art On-line (at http://www.msstate.edu/Fineart_Online). The old newsletter with its primitive ASCII art (a touch of the past) masthead is still there, but Fine Art now has a serious Web server hosting an online gallery, a massive resource list that includes an excellent compilation of subscriber lists for the arts, and a Gopher server. Fine Arts is probably one of two arts-related resources that still provide a slow command line interface (Arts Wire is the other).
Arts Wire is moving onto the Web with a little-known Web server at http://www.tmn.com/oh/Artswire/www/ awfront.html. When I tried it, it appeared to be a bit slow but it has some distinguishing features, among them links to the home pages of its member artists and member organizations. Another interesting feature is Arts Wire's guest Web art tours. Onc e again I found myself clipping and pasting dozens of references I had not seen while surfing other sites.
An archive is maintained of previous tours, which is a great way to deal with those mixes of active, not-so-active, and possibly out-of-date links that all servers tend to accumulate. Just about all of the art sites have their obligatory lists of other sites, and following the links until you forget where you began is a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon. The current mother launchpad of such excursions is Yahoo at http://www.yahoo.com. It has an enormous range of areas and should be mandatory for any hotlist you compile.
The arts are extremely well represented on Yahoo. With sub-categories as diverse as Body Art, Egyptian Art, Art Festivals, Commercial Art, and more, you'll be hard pressed to come up with a category not covered. Clicking on any of the areas takes you deep er into digressions within the category.
There appear to be far more sites for acquiring images listed in Yahoo's Pictures@ area than I have seen on any other list. With archives of animals, TV images, icons, and subjects as specific as climbing pictures, chemical structures, and drum corps, it is difficult to top this area as your one-stop resource for images. Music, dance, acting, and even magic are covered on this efficiently organized server. Crossover areas between art and commerce, such as fashion, also are indexed at Yahoo. In the apparel company listing, for example, it is possible to find everything from designer sneakers to information on the garment printing industry.
Artists have become a major sector of the Internet population. Although I have no statistics that show how well art is selling on the Internet (I have been fortunate in selling work online), it is clear that the exchange of imagery and ideas is an immense ly popular activity. Artists are the perfect model of a self-contained industry in that they must capture attention, educate their audience, market their products, and sell them to survive.
The Internet appears, for the moment, to be a great leveler in the marketing playfield. Artists can learn a lot by studying the methodical and sometimes even timid approach of corporations to the Internet. And large and small businesses can learn from the readily expansive networks that artists create.
Kenny Greenberg (kgreenb@panix.com) is a neon artist and owner of Krypton Neon in Long Island City. N.Y. He authored the chapter "Art on the Internet" for Tricks of the Internet Guru s (Sams).