(Page 2 of 2)
But not everyone is convinced that a digital-arts center or museum is such a nifty notion. Maxwell L. Anderson, the digitally adept director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said that relentless advances in technology made it next to impossible to construct a structure that would accommodate all future possibilities. "It's such a slippery proposition to build bricks and mortar for bytes," he said.
Advertisement
|
 |
|
Mr. Anderson also argued against separating digital art from more traditional forms for fear that its aesthetic value might be overshadowed by a focus on technological bells and whistles. "It's probably not the most fruitful thing to start segregating art-making practices by medium again," he said. "Ghettoizing would be the result. Instead, we want those artistic experiences to be seen in conjunction with others from the past because that's the best way to appreciate them."
Others assert that installing a digital art work in a marble-clad building would violate the spirit of a piece that was meant to be distributed over the Internet. Jon Ippolito, curator of new media at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, said that taking a train and standing in line to see digital art "would be a complete perversion of what this work is all about."
Laura McGough, who handles technology-oriented grant requests at the National Endowment for the Arts, said that the current decentralized system — a cross-country network of universities, museums and regional high-tech arts centers — was effectively providing digital artists with access to technology, commission dollars and exhibition space.
Of course the intangibility of many digital art works invites questions about whether they need to be enshrined in a physical space. In 1999 a group of institutions including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Asia Society and the San Francisco Modern, discussed forming a venture called the Virtual Arts Network. It would have created an online-only site for exhibitions and performances. But the collapse of the dot-com economy doomed it.
Since then, more digital artists are creating works that blur the lines between the real and the virtual, and so it is reasonable to install them somewhere that draws visitors.
Steve Dietz, the Walker's new-media curator, said that the digital arts would benefit from having museums devoted to them, much as the International Center of Photography helped establish photography as an art form. "There's a need for the energy and focus that an existing institution doing a digital-art show once a year can't provide," he said. "It needs more than that."
Mr. Dietz shares Mr. Anderson's concern that a digital-art museum might prevent the genre's acceptance by the broader art world. But he had a solution. Once the museum has developed an audience, he said, "maybe it should go out of business."
