Heaps of praise from the world's leading art and architecture critics have been lavished upon London's new Tate Modern, a glass-crowned power station on the bank of the River Thames.

Logically, then, a visit to the Tate's website is in order for art fans around the world.

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But what you see on the Internet isn't exactly what you get when you visit in person. The site describes the Tate Modern as "a major new gallery showing tasty babes, luxury goods ... and psychological props collected by the British social elite...."

Follow a link to the Tate Britain -- a branch of the museum dedicated to 500 years of British art -- and instead of grand Turner seascapes and Hogarth portraits, you'll see close-ups of canvases collaged with mud, scabby skin, and baggy eyes.

But this isn't a rogue RTMark parody -- it's the museum's first commission of Internet art, titled "Uncomfortable Proximity."

"I was very keen to expand what we were doing in virtual space at the same time we were expanding in real space," said Tate director Sandy Nairne, who oversees the museum's four branches.

"What we can offer is traffic," he said, referring to the site's 300,000 hits a day, "and allow people who come to the Tate site to come upon something new they didn't intend to find."

When visitors log on, they are greeted by two parallel windows: the official museum page and artist Graham Harwood's bold remix of the Tate's images and texts, branded with the banner "Mongrel Tate."

Harwood, 40, is a founding member of the artist group Mongrel, whose provocative "Natural Selection" search engine explored the theme of racism. He has previously exhibited at ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Now he has taken masterpieces of British art by Turner, Hogarth, Gainsborough, and others from the Tate's vast archives, and melded these with digital photos of his friends, family, and his own body. He also rewrote the texts of the website to present a "repressed" history of the museum ­-- foregrounding Britain's history of class and racial conflict.

"The Tate's scrapbook of British pictorial history has many missing pages," Harwood writes, "either torn out through revision or self-censored before the first sketch. Those that did make it created the cultural cosmetics of peoples profiting from slavery, migrant labour, colonisation and transportation."

Because Harwood's site may confuse or offend visitors, some doubted it would ever be released to the public. In May, the Guardian reported that the site's launch had been postponed over objections from museum officials, who asked the artist to modify his plans.

"Then there was a lot of people saying, 'Tate sucks' and 'People can't handle Net art,'" recalls Alex Galloway, editor of the digital art journal Rhizome, which maintains a community email list.

Curator Matthew Gansallo, senior research fellow for the Tate, denies that the museum asked for changes. Gansallo said there was "never a question" that the site would go live. "The artist and myself and the team were looking at the work and discussing how best to let the artist express himself," he said.