I first entered an art museum by mistake, at age 11, to get out of the rain. I lost my cool right away when I bumped into a John Marin watercolor daubed in wild, fiery hues. It stood framed, marvelous and alone, in the lobby of the venerable Phillips Collection in Washington. While I gawked, my impatient mother tried to pull me away. She failed.
In a sense I never left that watercolor. The experience set me off on a lifetime of studying and making art, exhibiting in museums and writing about them, spiced by thousands of visits. Lately, however, I've been entering museums across the world through the door of cyberspace. More than 5,000 of them await us there, at any hour, on any given day — and no one needs the rain as an excuse.
And yet, despite this joy of easy access, I must immediately caution that the Virtual Museum — with a few notable exceptions — doesn't cut it yet for most of us. Again and again I'm asked — because I've been making art on the Web since the early 90's — "Why is the Virtual Museum so boring?" And it is. The cyber gallery is nearly always dense, confusing, difficult to navigate, devoid of passion and, worse, of intellect. Not only are these sites a betrayal of the "muse" function at the core of the name museum, they often demand hours of downloading special software to handle special effects that are nothing special.
Given this bitter truth, we have every right to cringe — at first — when we hear that the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London will soon build a profit-making virtual Xanadu in the sky. Announced last spring, MOMA-Tate.com is now soliciting investors. Before the end of the year, MOMA-Tate will offer us Total Access. To what? Catalogs, lectures, prints, posters, photographs, original works of design, multiple-edition prints, video art, Web art, all made with one venue in mind: Virtual Space. The two "real" museums will of course continue to exist. For now.
But clearly a move of this kind — inspired by the huge numbers of users now stampeding onto the Web — signals a serious change in the way we process the arts in our society. Both MOMA and the Tate say they have almost as many "hits" (4 million) on their sites as 3-D walk-ins off the street (5 million). Other museums around the world report the same story. Some count more attendance in cyberspace than on earth. Given that in the United States alone there are more than 865 million recorded visits — three times our total population — to museums each year, we can safely assume an international arts audience of far more than one billion documented hitters in cyberspace.
For this immense — and immensely sophisticated — audience, expectations are high. By now, most of us have tasted Web innovation and provocation — from vanguard artists and writers, from MTV, from the Hubbell "deep space" telescope, and from "live cameras," a random collection of digital eyes casually positioned by ingenious documentarians in or near studios, bedrooms, street corners, lake fronts and mountaintops all over the globe. Some of us even watched Timothy Leary expire on our desktops.
Primed by all this, we expect serious content from the U.R.L., the Web address, of a museum, jammed as it already is with powerful visual images, staffed with creative minds and surrounded by the cream of our visual artist elite. Why, then, so . . . boring?
To answer this question, I set out to visit all 5,000 sites in search, like Diogenes, of an honest answer. I straddled the world seeking snippets of inspiration and attempted to fold myself into the particularities of this new medium at the Met, the Modern, the Whitney and the Guggenheim in New York, in the great museums in Chicago, Los Angeles, Texas, Europe, Russia, Asia, South America, even out to Ghana, Outer Mongolia and beyond.
Yes, the task proved impossible. But I clocked in hundreds. And maybe I'm near an answer that may inspire hope. I also believe I can lay out warnings, if not a surprising remedy, for MOMA-Tate and all those soon to follow them into cyberspace.
Certainly the problem is not cyberspace itself. Traditionalists argue that the Internet is inherently anti- art, that it fosters technocratic boredom, vapid content and alienation. But the huge upswing of Web users — more than 60 percent of all computer-equipped Americans go online regularly, many drawn to sources of specialized content (the Hubbell, for example), and to decidedly human "chatline" conversations — refutes this assertion. So do the increasing numbers of visual artists using the Web as a medium for their work (1,460 of them, according to Yahoo, the popular search engine).
I began my quest with two contrasting sites — the Metropolitan Museum in New York, among the world's largest, if not, next to the Louvre, its most prestigious, and the upstart Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, a decidedly hip stop among major museums. Upon hitting the Met's freshly redesigned site last spring, I was pleased to find a single, golden, glittering image: a precious gold headdress excavated at Ur, in Sumeria, where an Old Testament prophet named Abraham hung out. But the Met wouldn't let me gape for long. Like my mother at the Phillips, it pulled me away to a jam-packed directory that offered endless exhibitions, services, the Met Shop, of course, and a "free" Met-Net T-shirt.
Lately, the Met is even retreating in terms of scale, offering a diminutive picture of a Sargent painting, American modern design and "Painters in Paris, 1895-1950" beside its endless listings.
Now the Walker, befitting its contemporaneity, offers an entirely different reward — pure conceptual wit, courtesy of the artist Lawrence Weiner. BITS & PIECES, it says, each word housed in a solid block of black on white, PUT TOGETHER/ TO PRESENT/A SEMBLANCE/ OF THE WHOLE. Better yet, up in the far right corner, we see a rolling stream of enticing running attractions (Web Walker, Art Entertainment, Open Source and, inevitably, the Walker Shop) sometimes mixed with streaming nonfunctionalism, rather like a Web-based Gertrude Stein lyric: "Pride . . . Envy . . . Desire . . . Technology . . . Sins of Fortune: Media Art is Transforming Itself Again." Best of all, and unusual for a museum, we can watch a live WebCam, perched on the Walker's roof, revealing vivid street reality around the clock. But even the Walker steals our focus away: one click on any of Mr. Weiner's word blocks jumps us instantly somewhere else, onto another page where we're seduced to leave our computers and walk right down to the Real Museum, on Vineland Place, in Minneapolis.
We're given only a taste of the big current exhibitions in both the Met and the Walker (they want you to come in and pay for the full experience), but gobs of space are allotted to the permanent collections, where it's easy to lose control while scrolling on and on inside an art-historical maze. More than special effects, we need boldly stamped buttons, especially Return to Home, on every museum site, as well as indices of the names of artists and genres that work instantly.
If museums as sophisticated, as disparate as the Met and the Walker — the latter driven by an exceptional digital-arts department — engage in encyclopedic overkill, the malaise must have a deeper cause, beyond cyberspace alone. In fact, the pain of first entrance in the virtual museum is equivalent to the pain that addresses us in real museums.
Excepting an occasional knockout show in the towering well of the Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue, the real-world art palace is a multiplex cinema with corporate shading. Its first objective is not, alas, to wire you inside the art experience, one spirit to another. No, you are increasingly seen on roughly the same level as a network television viewer in the 50's by a besieged field that has seen its audience double in the last decade alone. Its professional atrium planners and designers batter us with dozens of attractions — billboard banners, moving electronic boards, posters and directories crammed with small emblems.
No wonder we can't scoot swiftly through the cyberspace door, either, if you go on the wings of Netscape or Explorer to big daddies like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tretyakov in Moscow or the Louvre, where the clicking and leaping required to see a single painting rivals standing in the Mona Lisa line. (Fairness forces me to point out, on the other hand, that Ms. Lisa's enigmatic smile is often scattered with bold abandon all over the Louvre U.R.L.).
You're similarly bombarded even by our boldest contemporaries, by MOMA, again, the Whitney, the Guggenheim (whose crowded directory is a contradiction to the power of the real museum's wide-open atrium), and even the exotic American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, where almost nothing moves except its name, followed by a stolid text-traditional home page.
Now each of these sites packs glowing moments when the Web's special virtue to empower you, the user, in your own time and space, comes to life. Endowed by Intel's dynamic software, the Whitney still offers spectacular tours through last year's immense "American Century" exhibition, which simply couldn't have been comprehended in the museum halls themselves. And the feisty Whitney Biennial — gone from the galleries but still online — offers a lead image that finds Roman de Salvo dining off a food tray that resembles a portable Powerbook; an explicit statement from the director, Maxwell L. Anderson, in defense of "Sanitation," Hans Haacke's anti- Giuliani installation; and an Internet Art room.
The Modern's ambitious site is spiced for the moment with blunt and immediate news about the strike lately settled with its employees, and by a big, bold layout that brings the lively P.S. 1 in Queens onto its site with panache. The brash National Museum of American Art, at the heart of the Smithsonian Institution, is totally virtual, while its building is renovated, for 1,001 nights, the exact length of the informative cultural calendar it offers. And the Hermitage in St. Petersburg hands us a nifty 3-D camera, courtesy of IBM, that lets us zoom in on a fine microscopic level to an exceptional art-historical smorgasbord, a tool lately matched by the Met, whose zoom feature, a digital camera in combination with FlashPix software, is quick and razor-sharp.
At these moments, a more accessible virtual museum begins to assert itself, one that encourages interaction between art and the user. "Interaction" was in fact a staple of museum rhetoric in the early 90's. Among its first institutional prophets were the Association of American Museum Directors, which was the host of an early Art Museum Network, largely the making of Mr. Anderson, then at the Emory University art gallery in Atlanta, and the Smithsonian, whose Museum Without Walls, a totally virtual invention, went "up" in 1994. Both the Getty Center for Research in the Arts and Humanities in Los Angeles, as well as its museum, led by John Walsh, sponsored broad-ranging debates and meetings, as did Ivain (the International Visual Arts Information Network) in Europe, joined by techno-friendly museums like the Pompidou in Paris, the Victoria and Albert in London and the determinedly revisionist Tate Gallery.
The early exchanges in these sites nearly always focused on bringing the user-visitor into a form of direct dialogue with artists, curators, historians and critics. I confess I played an active role in this neolithic idealism. Once, at the Victoria and Albert, I rashly predicted the advent of a virtual, personalized Third Kind Museum, correcting the errors of both the First Kind (the royal, closed palace of treasures) and the Second (the open, "democratic" football stadium, where everyone is relentlessly welcomed).
But in 2000, Third Kind-ism is still a marginal presence in the sea of Second Kind mega-sites. When the Whitney launched its first site five years ago, the director, David A. Ross (now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), set up a curatorial "chatline" of his own, where one day a week he joined a live dialogue with his curators and the public about critical issues, raising "chat" to the level of serious content. Alas, you won't find anything so spontaneous repeated anywhere now. Here and there directors offer, at most, polite but stiffly written e- mail exchanges to the audience out there.
This widespread insensitivity to intellectual exchange in a medium geared for it is inexcusable. In the new millennium, the critical question for the online museum is clear: whom do you think you're addressing in cyberspace? The overwhelming "hit" totals brandished by your press agents count only "visits," often momentary, not qualitative joy, which is rightly expressed by duration and interaction.
The answer is that the real virtual audience is one . . . person . . . at . . . a . . . time, and it's a person singularly capable of providing highly activist response and debate. Young adults at the demographic core of the new museum audience are ordering books from Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com and buying art directly from Sothebys.com. The enlightened post-postmodern curator had better attend the cool activism of this user or lose him or her to the next daring new communication technology, which might be the split- second wireless media already fast approaching us.
Certainly this sin of omission is out on the table — and acknowledged — inside the profession. When Glenn Lowry, the Modern's director, enthuses over MOMA-Tate, he focuses first on the potential "community" it might build. "The site will draw millions of minds from around the world already focused on one rich, complex subject, the arts," he says. "We have a great chance to get this rich cast of characters talking to each other, and exchanging opinions."
But this Third Kind option has always been present. It remains untouched because few curators and directors take the Web seriously, even now. They delegate its aesthetic, even its content, to Web-site architects and commercial design teams. Rather than lead, dare or innovate, the cyberart museum retreats — with a precious few exceptions, mostly huddled until recently out in the Web's Off-Off Broadway, where obscure public, private and university galleries thrive, unburdened by slick, top-heavy design squads.
If you want to taste primitive Third Kindism, try vagabond art institutions you might otherwise ignore: the National Museum of Women's History; the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art; the Fairy Art Museum in Japan (chocked with venerable tales); the (virtual) World Museum of Erotic Art; the Sulabh Museum of Toilets in India, where the vintage pot at last gains historic dignity.
Fly even to staid Harvard, to the Fogg Museum, where, in a section titled "Investigating the Renaissance," you can X-ray a masterful 16th-century "Portrait of a Man," wielding your browser to peel away the surface coating and find the anonymous 1540 master daubing, marking, erasing, perfecting his man.
Now for good news. We're about to see touches of this ingenuity and intensity in mainstream art museums. The Whitney, the Modern, the Walker and the San Francisco Modern are all commissioning and collecting new art for the Web, much of it interactive at base. And they seem to be planning exhibitions that think first, not last of the Web — like San Francisco's "Making Sense of Modern Art," which uses Web-based video-digital "conversations" between artists, collectors and critics as an integral element of the installation, which opens next month.
Here's the critical point: the free- spirited Web forces a set of unprecedented demands on museums, on us all. It will inevitably drive the Web master to address the audience in personal, one-to-one terms, to provide experiences of viewing and dialogue not possible in "real" public space.
Even if pure Third Kind-ism is far off, we're about to glimpse (maybe even smell and touch) its delights soon. Finally, the museum in cyberspace can't lose, because we, the users, millions of us, will teach it what we want, just as we revolutionized the stiff old Web itself, just as one unruly kid fell hard for John Marin long ago: a closer, more involving embrace of the often profound experience we have decided to call "art," for now.
Douglas Davis is an artist, critic, educator and the author of "The Museum Transformed: Design and Culture in the Post-Pompidou Age" (Abbeville Press). A Web-art pioneer, in 1994 he created "The World's First Collaborative Sentence," now in the collection of the Whitney.
