Art on the internet or internet art?

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Christine Stender

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AM7001

January 2016

Word count 4998

Change Analysis Report: Internet Art With the triumph of the internet, there are a number of challenges the art world has to face. From new forms of communication and exchange to new forms of art that have developed from and with the internet. This report looks at some of the issues around the development of internet art, and post-internet art, and attempts to transfer this into ‘the real world’. The report starts by first telling the story of internet art, meaning net.art and post-internet art, and how it evolved, describing examples of art works originating in this particular genre. It then focusses on the analysis of the challenges internet art has to face, online as well as offline: for example conservation and collecting. It also looks at how internet art interacts with more traditional parts of the arts sector; for example how arts organisations can benefit from participating in the artistic use of this still evolving medium, considering the examples of Tate Britain and the Solomon R. Guggenheim. The report then concludes by discussing how internet art has changed the perception of art itself and created new meaning in relation to it. This analysis of change in internet art covers a time span of about sixty years, starting with the invention of the internet, but focussing on the period between 1994 and today.

1. The Evolution of Internet Art First one needs to look at the origins of internet art, which also goes by the names of net.art and/ or online art (Ippolito, 2002). During the development of the internet, artists got intrigued by the fascination of this new medium, so ‘by 1995, eight percent of all Web sites were produced by artists’ (Ippolito, 2002). But artists started using the internet for their purposes earlier than this: With the first use of the computer, there were scientists who were also artists and created art with the help of this digital technology, like Bela Julesz and Michael Noll (Hoveling, 2015). The idea of connecting computers and in that way of interlinking people beyond geographical boarders then, in the beginning and middle of the 1960’s, enabled artists to create art works which were based on the input of different individuals from all over the planet. To refer to Martin (1999) ‘visual art has always involved a mixture of concept and craft. The technology available at any given point in history has always exerted a profound influence on the artistic production of an era’. That means that the internet is not only a tool to create (net.)art but is the foundation of it: ‘Internet art is art that is made to be online. To be experienced from a computer screen’ (Hoveling, 2015). In her book Internet Art, Rachel Greene (2003: 162) describes it that way: ‘Whatever images of net.art projects grace these pages, beware that, seen out of their native HTML, out of their networked, social habitats, they are the net.art equivalents of animals in zoos’. Besides the fact that artists used the internet since its very beginning, the term net.art evolved in 1995, when the Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened a damaged e-mail and all he could make of it was the term net.art (Greene, 2003: 162). ‘Net.art stood for communications and graphics, e-mail, texts and images, referring to and emerging into one another; it was artists, enthusiasts, and technoculture critics trading ideas, sustaining one another’s interest through ongoing dialogue’ (Greene, 2003: 162). This is one of the reasons, net.art mostly developed outside the given system of the arts sector, which however ‘contributed to its broad and international following. The absence of a gallery shingle, a museum lintel […] means that many people who would never set a foot in a gallery stumble across works of Internet art by following a fortuitous link’ (Ippolito, 2002). Net.art mainly describes the developments from 1994 to 1998, when ‘the internet allowed net.artists to work and talk independently of any bureaucracy or art-world institution without 1


being marginalized or deprived of community’ (Greene, 2003: 163). Referring to Kukovec (2002) ‘art history would describe it (net.art) as a movement […] net.art 1994-1998 will become a part of the visual heritage of the internet’. In 1994, the dominant channel for net.art was e-mail, as used by, for example Heath Bunting’s project ‘Kings Cross Phone-In’. He distributed the numbers of several phone boxes around the London train station Kings Cross and invited people from all over the world to create ‘a musical intervention’ by ringing these phone boxes and to communicate and exchange with strangers who picked up the phones. (Greene, 2003: 164) But net.art also dealt and deals with less comforting topics: Starting in 1995, the project No Men’s Land (www.nomensland.eu) collects pictures taken from boarders in Europe to capture the ‘opening of the boarders’ after the fall of the Soviet Union. cym, the artist behind the project, then transforms the pictures into HTML code, transforming them into abstracts. ‘In this way the abstract images show some similarities with the political borderlines in Central Europe. Political lines are constructed to define the boundaries of the different countries, but reality does not always follow these lines.’ (cym, 2005) The next two years were characterised by artists who played with the features of the internet, exploiting its ‘immediacy and immateriality’, often by working with the ‘language of the machine’ itself (Greene, 2003: 162). Mark Napier, for instance created pieces to ‘destroy or disfigure HTML objects’ to pile up their contents into new designs (Greene, 2003: 168). The following pictures show the time-delayed outcome of his work Shredder (1998, ongoing) applied to the Museum of Modern Art website (www.moma.com):

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3 Source: Own representation based on Napier (2016)

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The officially proclaimed ending of the net.art movement was announced in 1998 and caused by a variety of reasons which all end up in the conclusion that the virtual reality did not replace the real world, but turned into the ‘increased profanity of cyperspace’ (Kukovec, 2002 and Greene, 2003). As Greene (2003: 169) described it, net.art was threatened by ‘its own success’, artists who originally spent their time creating pieces of art with and of the internet, now started to get involved in the academic discussion about their movement and to use ecommerce possibilities. According to Greene (2003) in that way artists lost their ‘freewheeling, anti-establishment spirit […] to the institutional fold’. But as Kukovec (2002) put it: ‘it was just another proclamation of an end, so nothing really changed in everyday life. Net.art remains an attractive denominator.’ Net.art and Post-internet Art The development of internet art in the following years experienced two interpretations: Some declare that the idea of net.art lives on, changing and adapting to current technological and social changes the internet goes through (Kukovec, 2002 and Greene, 2003). Others instead say that the world now faces the period of post-internet art, referring ‘not to a time “after” the internet, but rather to an internet state of mind — to think in the fashion of the network’ (Johnson, 2014). To differentiate between the two, one could follow Wallace’s (2014) definition, stating that ‘post-Internet artists have moved beyond making work dependent on the novelty of the Web to using its tools to tackle other subjects’. He continues in explaining that net.artists create work to exist ‘exclusively online’, while the post-internet generation uses the internet to create art works which exist in the ‘real world’. Therefore net.art and postinternet art can indeed persist next to each other. The following examples of art made off and with the internet stress the co-existence of both movements. The Tate’s archive names the project ‘The Dumpster’ (2006, ongoing) by Levin, Nigam and Feinberg as one example of net.art, which focusses on ‘social portraiture, documentary and database art’ (Tate, 2016). The Dumpster collects data from web blogs and other social media on break ups to map out ‘global romantic pain’, which can be discovered by the individual posts as well as by exploring similarities in the described ‘dumps’ posted by teenagers, ‘creating a dynamic, interactive map’ (Tate, 2016 and Levin, 2006). Another net.art project which is based on social media and therefore follows the trends of the World Wide Web is ‘Such Tweet Sorrow’, a modern-day interpretation of Romeo and Juliet posted by a cast of six of the Royal Shakespeare Company over a time span of five weeks in 2010. The cast resuscitated the story but based it into the 21th century, using the devices teenagers today would use (Kennedy, 2010), giving the audience the possibility to take part in and influence the story line. Just as described by Park (2009) net.art has the capability to ‘empower the user to be an interactive artist’, as these two examples show.

(@julietcap16, 2010) 3


Whilst the two mentioned projects examine how contemporary net.art transforms a given input and creates something new, the next example additionally mirrors a shift in the perception of what should be considered art in the online world (Goldstein, 2014). With more than 15.000 visitors in Minneapolis in 2015 and more than 80 revenues in total, the Internet Cat Video Festival does everything ‘compelling art should: raising questions, challenging assumptions, angering people, and […] creating a real experience’ (MAD, 2015). The festival is organised by the Walker Art Center to create an ‘offline celebration of online cat videos’ and it that way follows its history of net.art based projects, like äda which was acquired by the Center in 2008 (Walkerart, 2016 and Greene, 2003: 164).

Source: Sandals (2014)

The festival bridges the gap between net.art and post-internet art, as ‘in fact, one of the features that distinguishes post-internet art from the "Net.art" […] is its ability to crossover between online and offline formats’ (Wallace, 2014). Following Hoveling’s (2015) definition that net.art is to be seen on screen and should not be taken out of its natural habitat (Greene, 2003), the festival offers a platform to consume net.art just as it is supposed to be consumed. The cultural and social, offline experience of the celebration of internet content whatsoever almost make the festival part of the post-internet movement: ‘Any cultural production which has been influenced by a network ideology falls under the rubric of post-internet’ (Vierkant, 2010). The following projects sum up the idea of post-internet art, which is ‘beyond making work dependent on the novelty of the Web’ (Wallace, 2014), but uses its tools to create art that can also be experienced offline. Vierkant’s project Image Objects looks at the way art can be ‘shared, reproduced, altered, and distributed more easily than ever before in human history’ (Wallace, 2014) and creates ‘photographic prints with the depth and presence of a sculpture’ (Vierkant, 2016) building up to a countless number of possible variations, outcome and finally art works. Another example of post-internet art is DuBois’ Hindsight Is Always 20/20 (2008), which presents printed eye-charts of the ‘most frequently used words from every U.S. President’s State of the Union speeches up to George W. Bush’, commenting on the way society and the media re-interpret culture by changing the focus (Goldstein, 2014). 4


2. Challenges Whereas net.art still operates in the online world, ‘post-internet art, by contrast, is wholly compatible with art markets and art-world detachment’ (Droitcour, 2014). The deriving challenges for net.art will be examined further in the following paragraph. The first problem solely internet-based artists have to face is the threatening possibility that their works go obsolete (Goldstein, 2014), as works could and can disappear ‘due to link fail, lost services, damaged code, or incompatibility with players/ browsers’ (Net.art, 2016). This opens up new challenges in terms of preservation and conservation. Goldstein (2014) refers to the example of a piece by Damien Hirst, a shark conserved in formaldehyde which was sold for 8 Million US-Dollars, but ‘started rotting away’ shortly after its acquisition because ‘the formaldehyde wasn’t prepared properly’. Just like any other piece of art from any other art form, it is the owner’s responsibility to take care of the consistence of pieces of net.art (Goldstein, 2014), or as Ippolito (2002) phrases it, looking at the value of a piece: ‘That value would be the sum total of money a museum would be willing to spend over time to reprogram the site to ward off obsolescence.’ What makes the preservation of net.art different to other art forms, is its ‘very origin’ (Ippolito, 2002): the fast technical development of the internet forces artists ‘to provide proper documentation on how this piece works, how it’s preserved, and how it’s maintained’ (Goldstein, 2014). Hence artists do not only have to give instructions on how to translate their works into current formats, but also ‘formats that don’t exist yet’ (Ippolito, 2001). Ippolito, in his position of Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim, introduced a questionnaire in 2001, asking net.artists to finish the sentences ‘In its original version, this artwork could be…’ and ‘In later recreations, this artwork could be…’ as the interpretation will differ according to the media used. Laforet in 2009 introduced several ways to ‘compensate obsolescence [of net.art]: emulation, migration, score, reinterpretation, archiving’ which also can be combined, and almost always require a sense of re-interpretation, as net.artworks ‘out of their networked, social habitats [are] the equivalents of animals in zoos’ (Greene, 2003: 162). But it is not only about ‘the way the audience experiences artworks, but [one] needs to have access to the types of information so the preservation process can take place’ (Laforet, 2009). For the project The Dumpster by Levin, Nigam and Feinberg (2006) for example, that would mean that you cannot preserve the interactive map of global romantic pain without access to the blogs and social media forums, which the teenagers used to express their feelings in the first place. Out of this boundary evolved another project, the website net.art (2016) operates a Digital Mortuary, collecting traces of lost net.art, like ‘url's, code, screenshots, user experience, artist statements’ to conduct ‘digital archaeology’. The speed of innovation within the online world and certain challenges deriving from it, also manifest in for example, Cornelia Sollfrank’s project Net.Art Generator (1999, ongoing). Under the slogan ‘Smart artist makes the machine do the work’, the artist offers an automated service on her website to generate ‘artistic images with networked material’ based on parameters given by the user (Transmediale, 2016). Thus, neither the material for the images nor the final images themselves are by created Sollfrank, the work ‘questions notions of authorship (who is the artist?), copyright (is it legal to use the material?), and creativity (who creates and how?)’ (Transmediale, 2016). Because of the fact that the internet develops so fast, the ‘real world’ cannot keep up with the deriving demands, in this case: demands for legal restrictions and frameworks (Transmediale, 2016).

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Within the continuing evolution of the internet, there are negative as well as positive features, one can suffer or benefit from in producing net.art. ‘Easy access’ is one of positive ones: In his essay ‘Ten Myths of Internet Art’, Ippolito (2002) describes that the fast spread of internet culture and net.art is based on the fact that a) one does not need to have an extensive educational training to undergo to produce net.art, but that it is more about ‘the philosophy of ‘DIY: Do It Yourself’’. He continues in saying that making art for the internet is not ‘just a matter of learning the right tools, but also of learning the right attitude’. The second reason for the fast spread is b) the accessibility of those tools. As the number of internet users worldwide tripled in the last ten years up to 3.17 billion in 2015 (Statista, 2016), access to internet is in a lot of areas on the planet easier to gain and to afford than access to ‘tubes of cadmium red or a bronze foundry’ (Ippolito, 2002). Therefore, ‘through the Internet, [networking] opens the artworks to all people who have computer and Internet access, and it allows the users to participate in the artworks as the subject on a same level as the net.artist’ (Park, 2009). Furthermore Ippolito (2002) points out that not only the creation of net.art is more inclusive and open, but also the distribution is: ‘there is no comparison between the democratizing contact made possible by the Internet and the geographic exclusivity of the analogue art world’. Distribution and collecting of net.artworks is the next challenge to be looked into. Whilst distribution of net.art is ‘as easy as it gets’, with internet as ‘the exhibition space’ (Kukovec, 2002), collecting net.art is challenging for a number of reasons. Post-internet art is ‘wholly compatible with arts markets’ (Droitcour, 2014) not only because it transforms art for the internet, into art that uses the internet for an offline experience, but also because ‘PostInternet art is in love with advertising’. Droitcour’s (2014) critical approach compares postinternet artworks to detergents in commercials: ‘Detergent isn't as stunning at a laundromat, and neither does Post-Internet art shine in the gallery’. To examine net.art in terms of collectability, it is not only about the lack of tangibility but also the idea of net.art itself that counteracts the frameworks of the art world. To quote Park (2009): ‘net artists’ main enemies are bureaucratic systems and institutions which are supervising and interrupting net artists' freedom and utopia on the Net’. That means that one cannot ‘squeeze net.art into the framework of traditional art’, but has to obey the rules of cyberspace: ‘one has to be familiar with the life and the ways of cyberspace to interpret it correctly and properly understand it’ (Kukovec, 2002). Referring to Ippolito (2002) early net.artists’ reward was not a financial one, ‘but the opportunity to contribute to a new artmaking paradigm’. Greene (2003) observes the same spirit, but, just as Ippolito, also observes ‘a new vibe’ within the movement, beginning in 1999, when artists started using ‘e-commerce capabilities’.

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3. The Cross-Over between the Online and the Offline World The next paragraph will look at the evolving cross-over between online/ net.art and offline/ art world, starting with the examination of collecting of net.art. To then ask what impact internet (art) has on the arts sector and how arts organisations can benefit from interacting with the online world, based on the examples of the Tate Britain and the Solomon R. Guggenheim. From a modern-day collector’s point of view, Goldstein (2014) observes that in the past, there was not ‘a big market for people buying Internet art, but that’s slowly changing’. To buy net.art, Goldstein (2014) offers a number of possibilities for collectors and museums. Buying the website a project is on and then ‘paying a service provider to host your site’, is one of those possibilities and according to Goldstein (2014) ‘is typically a pretty simple task’. Owning the website means that the owner can decide if the artwork should be a public piece or only made visible to a group of people using password protection (Goldstein, 2014). Looking at an interactive project Goldstein (2014) suggests the sale of shares, to give shareholders the opportunity to ‘work on it together’. Ippolito (2002), furthermore refers to ‘certificates of authenticity’, which have been used for ‘equally immaterial forms of art […] since the 1970s’. Whereas the process of buying a piece therefore does not seem too complicated, it is the maintenance of internet art, which complicates its position: Conservation and preservation, as described before, are just as important as display and integration. To examine the way museums and galleries handle net.art, the report will look at examples from the Tate and the Guggenheim. Solomon R. Guggenheim Ippolito (2002), in his position as the Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, explains the ‘particularly long-term vision to collecting online art’. The museum’s Variable Media Initiative places net.art into the Guggenheim’s permanent collection and relies on an endowment to finance ‘future data migration, emulation, and reprogramming costs’. The Guggenheim Collection Online features ‘nearly 1700 artworks by more than 575 artists’ (Guggenheim, 2016), which cannot only be looked at, but also interactively used by the website’s visitors. Interactive pieces like Net.flag (2002, ongoing) by Mark Napier and Brandon (1998-99) by Shu Lea Cheang, create a participatory experience of art (Guggenheim, 2016), implementing Napier’s intention: ‘I want a part of my artwork to be available to everybody’ (Napier, cited in Berwick, 2001). To adjust to net.artists’ libertarian approach, the museum’s ‘acquisition of online works into its collection is less a radical experiment in evaluating a new medium than a recognition of the importance’ (Ippolito, 2002). Making provision for the speed of change Drutt, head of the Guggenheim’s Virtual Museum in 2001, said that ‘the conceptual parameters of the [net.art] work are ultimately more important than physical manifestations’ (cited in Berwick, 2001). With its current approach the Guggenheim learned from previous attempts to bring net.art into brick-andmortar galleries. Berwick (2001) names the 2000 Whitney Biennial as an example in which net.art ‘was projected on a wall in a dark room with just one computer, providing limited opportunity for individual interaction’ and questions if traditional museums and galleries ‘may in the end prove not to be the best exhibition venues’. Nonetheless, collecting net.art serves the Guggenheim’s aim to enhance its collection ‘in response to emerging talent as well as a mandate to fill in critical historical gaps’ (Guggenheim, 2016) and therefore is part of its Unique Selling Proposition.

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Tate Britain Even though the crossover between traditional arts organisations and net.art is still in flux, ‘the public’s appetite and appreciation for [net.art] is growing’ (Berwick, 2001). The Tate started in 2000 to commission net.art projects and to embed them in their online collection (Fontaine, 2004) and still develops its relation to net.art. The 1840s GIF Party in February 2014, as part of the Late At Tate events, proofs the continuing approach of ‘old and new’. Members of the public as well as five digital artists were invited to transform five artworks from the Tate’s collection into GIF’s (Graphics Interchange Format), which were shown on the night alongside the original artworks and shared publically (http://tatecollectives.tumblr.com/tagged/1840s-GIF-Party). This ‘digital mass participatory project’ was primarily aimed at audience development to ‘target a younger, digitally engaged audience’ (Ohlsen and Villaespesa, 2014). Additionally, the Taylor Digital Studio was transformed into a ‘One Stop GIF Shop’, to show the audience ‘more about the wonderful world of animated GIFs’ (Ohlsen and Villaespesa, 2014). The project received 587 submissions, had about 2,500 visitors and reached a high level of awareness, with 22,000 views on the submission’s website and more than 85,000 Likes and Re-posts for the submissions themselves until May 2014 (Ohlsen and Villaespesa, 2014).

(Tate Collectives, 2016) But the Tate Britain did not only use the medium of internet art to its benefit to increase awareness and publicity, but also to increase engagement and participation in the creative process, which, according to Berwick (2001) is net-arts’ ‘most distinct and compelling feature’. The simultaneous online-collaboration of artists and users create an atmosphere ‘as though an empty gallery could somehow preserve the footprints of previous visitors, their words still ringing in the air’ (Ippolito, 2002). Traditional Arts Organisations Even though net.art ‘has not yet found its place’ (Meijer, 2007), it is part of a wider attempt by the arts sector to examine the digital world and its opportunities. Like the Tate did not only use the 1840s GIF Party to display net.art, but also to engage with new audiences, many organisations seek their benefits from going ‘online’. A study from the Arts Council England in 2010 shows that more than half of the online population ‘have used the internet to engage with the arts and cultural sector in the last 12 months’ (ACE, 2010: 4). The study also shows the different levels of engagement with the arts online, from ‘access’ only, which just reflects interests in ‘discovering what’s on, filtering opportunities and planning attendance or participation’ to ‘creation of artistic content’ (ACE, 8


2010: 5). Furthermore, the study shows that online engagement ‘augments, rather than replaces, the live experience’ (ACE, 2010: 4), standing in contrast to upcoming voices saying that online sharing platforms could revolutionise the offline world: ‘With tumblr, you don’t need to pay, you don’t need to go to a gallery, so it cuts away the whole art industry’ (Vincent, 2013). The example of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which transformed Romeo and Juliet into a Twitter-story as well as the 1840s GIF Party by the Tate, yet point out the possibilities arts organisations can find in net.art, from audience development, to reinterpretation, engagement and resuscitation of the meaning of an artwork into modern day relevance.

Source: ACE (2010: 5)

The positive findings by the ACE additionally, are internationally underpinned by for example, Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, 2012, which shows that arts organisations experience positive outcome from technology and the internet. The participating arts organisation especially pointed out the internet’s contribution towards the ‘democratization of art and creation’ (Thomson, 2013).

Source: Thomson (2013)

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Depending on the art form and arts organisation online engagement naturally differs. A study by the network of Canadian Public Arts Funders in 2011 visualises different art forms and their engagement in online activities (Poole, 2011). Net.art in this case goes by the name of Media Arts, true to the fact that ‘it has many other names’ (Meijer, 2007) and visually proofs its base in the online world, but also its remarkable position within the arts sector. As Meijer (2007) puts it: ‘It is fully inside the Net. context, but at the same time fully outside of the .Art context.’

Source: Poole (2011: 24)

4. Conclusion The ongoing debate and unclear definition of net.art, internet art and post-internet art only underpin the fact that art made for and with the internet indeed is the ‘newest art form around’ (Meijer, 2007) and describe the continuing development this new genre undergoes. Comparing net.art and post-internet art, it is important to say that even though similar in the way that the internet plays an important role in the creative process, net-art and post-internet art are two different streams within contemporary art. While net.art depends on the internet not only in the creation itself, but also when it comes to distribution and display; post-internet art uses the internet as one in many tools to create and distribute artworks. But nonetheless, the apparent similarity just shows how undefined art made off and with the internet is. Broekmann (1997) cited in Park (2009) points out that this state of indefiniteness will continue as the internet continues to change: ‘the Internet lets net.art never become static and stop, flowing constantly in the Internet ocean’. From its invention in the 1960’s to the triumph of the internet, until today, there always were people using the internet for their artistic purposes, adapting to and pushing the technological possibilities. Even if net.art is proclaimed ‘dead’, it will continue to exist and to evolve, just like it happened in 1998. All in all, the internet changed the art world in general and according to Thomson (2013) it has ‘played a major role in broadening the boundaries of what is considered art’. Looking back at the Internet Cat Content Festival, it sets an outstanding example of how this change in perception happens in the art world, just as the statement made by the Museum of Art and 10


Design, New York implies: The festival does everything ‘compelling art should: raising questions, challenging assumptions, angering people, and […] creating a real experience’ (MAD, 2015). The internet offers a platform not only to create art, but also ‘provides a structure for people to get organized, exchange and collaborate’ (Poole, 2011: 12), and this interconnection enables people to set this ‘strong impulse for the shifting of our perception of other media and the world’ (Noema, 2002). But as shown by the examples of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Tate, this shift can also benefit traditional arts organisations, ‘to evolve to remain relevant in the age in which they operate’ (Khan, 2012). Nevertheless, there still is the need to come up with suggestions on how to use the existing links between the online and the offline world and how to set up new ones. Meijer’s six recommendations of how museums’ could use their positions in favour of net.art, can be extended onto all arts sectors dealing with this new art form. Meijer (2007) suggests to collaborating with traditional arts organisations to ‘bring net.art to the people’, which of course would require for the arts world to recognize its significance. The international award for net.art Priz NetArt is one way to increase acknowledgement, offering 10,000 US-Dollars to an artist ‘making outstanding work on the internet’ (Priz NetArt, 2015). In addition to its educational function, Meijer (2007) addresses the museum’s responsibility towards conservation and preservation, which due to net.art’s ‘very origin’ (Ippolito, 2002) requires particular diligence. The last main point Meijer (2007) takes into account is the experience of traditional arts organisations, because of which they can offer net.artists ‘a set of vocabularies’ to help defining themselves. And here again, the debate about net.art pushes its own boundaries: Ippolito’s (2002) statement that ‘online art's disconnect from the mainstream art world has actually contributed to its broad appeal and international following’ primarily stands in contrast to Meijer’s claim, but at this point of the development of net.art, it is more about if the ‘web artwork has integrity and is a strong, creative expression, [because then] it’s fine for it to deviate from the Web site as a pure entity’ (Goldstein, 2014). With arts organisations like the Guggenheim approaching net.art in an open-minded and adventuresome way (Ippolito, 2002), net.art changed the traditional art world, not only through artworks but also through its ‘off the mainstream’ approach, that made arts organisations change their conventional strategies. So this report’s aim to analyse the change within a certain topic concerning the arts sector, does not look at a single aspect of a broader topic, but the development of an entire genre and its influences on the art world.

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