Toby Kasper writes:
>It seems to me that, with the increasing number of museum collections >at
least partly online, the entire way we conceive of the project of >the museum
may be in flux, or at least be ripe for some critical >evaluation.
 
The Director of the Whitney Museum, David Ross, just returned from
a trip out west where he was shown all the goodies coming up
from Silicon Graphics. He posted on the Whitney Conference
on Echo that what he saw reaffirmed his decision to concentrate
on making new technologies available to artists and quoted
John Baldessari about how artists need to approach technology
on the level of the pencil. The Whitney will have some sort
of Web site up soon with pages by invited artists.
 
This seems to me to be a very prudent way of going about all this.
The Whitney is working with a local BBS (Echo) that is arts
based and bringing artists into the mix, just as they are doing
in some of their current exhibitions. It's cheap, it's fun and
in the end, will be very productive for the museum and the
public. There's no reason why current art scholarship shouldn't
be claiming it's virtual web ground, too. Ross likes to quote
Nam June Paik, who said years ago "We don't need Cybergenic art,
We need art for a Cybergenic age." Same goes for museums.
 
Robbin Murphy
Managing Editor, ArtNet
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