Here's a bit of topical news about art world maneuvering that I'm using as a pretext to encourage you to explore Rhizome, Fineart Forum, and Nettime.
The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York's Soho has recently announced a partnership with the online net.art resource Rhizome. Rhizome is the leading US-based locus for writing about and links to the thriving global net.art phenomenon.
[Net.art is a term often used to designate art works created specifically for the internet.] This association guarantees some financial and institutional stability to the threadbare Rhizome operation, and buys some instant street cred for the New Museum. [Credibility among net.artists is not easily won, since they're often highly ambivalent about the way BigMuseum has suddenly embraced their often deliberately unassailable work in the last couple of years.]
Be sure to check out Rhizome--despite it's annoying but probably necessary membership and password restrictions. [Don't worry, you'll get a good look round without bumping into closed doors.] And consider becoming a member--which is easy and triggers no art-spam in the mailbox. But you do want to open your box to their e-mail digest for which you'll need to sign up. Friday is always a free day at Rhizome, so make that your day for exploration. Highly recommended.
FAF: Fineart Forum has a similar e-mail digest service. Their beat is "art+technology net news." Their masthead boasts "15 years online," which is Methuselahan in web-years. They're good.
Much of the current net.art activity traces its roots back to early [and vigorous] discussions about digital life, culture and arts in the text-only bulletin board days of the late '80's. Thanks to e-mail, a host of global artists discovered one another and began an exciting babble of ideas that continues to this day...at Nettime. This free-form congeries of notices, polemical essays, links and screeds about art, politics and digital culture has a global audience and a Euro-theoretical cast to it. Nettime is the very pulse of this emerging discourse.
So get to work.
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