What's the Whitney's newest new thing?
Hint:It has nothing to do with Giuliani

By Carolyn Kleiner

Late last week, curators were still setting up the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2000 Biennial Exhibition, which opens March 23. Battles were already being waged over the inclusion of Sanitation, an installation piece that likens New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and other public officials to Nazis–a direct response to Giuliani's high-profile war against last year's "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. But while politicians and the press debate the freedom-of-expression scandal du jour, the art world is buzzing about something else altogether: The 70th Biennial, widely regarded as a signal of what's hot in contemporary art, includes, for the first time ever, Internet art.

"I don't think any of us in the group were particularly well versed in Net art at the outset," confesses Lawrence Rinder of the California College of Arts and Crafts, one of the show's six curators. After endless hours of Web surfing and debate, the panel came up with a broad range of works, including John F. Simon Jr.'s neo-conceptualist Every Icon, a computer function set up to generate every possible combination of black and white squares on a 32 x 32 grid over several hundred trillion years; Fakeshop, a site that calls up boxes of text and images from live performances; Ben Benjamin's pop-culture junkyard Superbad; and the activist rtmark.com, a mock mutual fund Web site that encourages participation in corporate sabotage projects, such as tampering with greeting card displays to celebrate, for example, the virtues of "the execution of one's soulmate."

There's clearly more to Internet art than pretty pictures or flashy graphics that just happen to appear in cyberspace. "Digital art becomes a revolutionary practice when it begins to think about technology in its own right, not merely as a tool or technique," says new-media critic Terry Harpold. Still, many Net artists support themselves working as programmers or graphic designers. "There's a healthy interplay between the two worlds," says digital artist David Crawford of lightofspeed.com, who also creates animated graphics for a design firm. "My artwork has largely been in a state of accelerated development because of new skills I've been learning on the job . . . [and] exposure to expensive new technologies."

Recent vintage. The Net art movement has existed for about five years, but while a number of European exhibits have featured Internet works, the Biennial marks the first time digital pieces will be shown alongside more traditional media in a major U.S. retrospective. A small number of museums, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and New York's Guggenheim, now commission and collect Internet art.

Displaying cyberworks that are not discrete physical objects is a challenge. But, says Steve Dietz, director of new-media initiatives at the Walker, it's no more difficult than exhibiting conceptual and performance art pieces. "What you preserve is, in some sense, a snapshot or documentation of an event." The Whitney is using three exhibition methods: an online gallery, individual computer stations, and wall projections. But some Internet artists don't care if their works are shown in museums or galleries. "The most interesting thing about this medium is instant global distribution," says Simon. To date, he has sold 54 numbered edition copies of Every Icon on his Web site, numeral.com, at $20 a pop. (Still, calculating market value for Web site-cum-masterpieces that exist only in cyberspace remains tricky.)

Not everyone in the Internet art world is pleased with these moves toward the mainstream. Some disdain the growing commercialization of a genre that grew out of free, unfettered public access. Last year, the artists of jodi.org accepted the Webby award for the Arts with this "thank you": "Ugly commercial sons of bitches." And even those who believe that making Internet art and making money are not mutually exclusive worry about what's going to happen next. "My guess is that Net art is going to become pretty fashionable," says Mark Amerika, whose Grammatron (at grammatron.com), a multimedia narrative combining texts, links, music, and animation, appears in the Biennial. "For better or worse."