You can almost smell the oranges. Light bounces off their bright orange peels, as they sit on the table in an intricately woven basket. To the left of the oranges lie a few bright yellow lemons. To the right, a rose balances delicately on a saucer that holds a cup.

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What a beauty: The Frick shows its collection of masterpieces online. Photo: frick.org

The painting slowly changes, bleeding into the original work. Now a plate of potato pieces sits in the painting, stuck between the basket and the lemons.

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The potatoes are gone, and the varnish on the painting has been removed, along with centuries of overpaints. It’s as if I’m peering over the shoulder of the art restorer, watching the cleaning in person instead of online.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” (1633) is on loan from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to the Frick Museum in New York City until May. On Frick.org, a Flash graphic illustrates four phases of the painting: from a radiograph of the original to its current, cleaned version.
For at least a decade, museums and galleries have maintained websites for marketing purposes: to display their location, history and exhibition information. But in recent years, ambitious institutions have made increasingly versatile and innovative use of the Web to display their collections online.

Previously, one wouldn’t have been able to see the detailed steps of a painting’s cleaning with such ease. Now, you can zoom in and see the minute details of the painting, hear the curator talk, and learn about the piece without ever having to leave your room. As Frick curator Denise Allen says, “There is the understanding at the Frick, and I’m sure at every other institution, that what the Web and a computer can do is present information in a way that is not available in any other medium.” Websites offer people who might never visit a museum the opportunity to delve into a work of art and explore it thoroughly. Besides excellent educational opportunities for teachers and students, the Web allows new personal encounters with art and artifacts.

The Louvre in Paris allows Louvre.fr visitors the opportunity to create “My Personal Space” by letting them select works of art and add them to albums, effectively creating their own virtual gallery. If they prefer virtual tours, they can visit the museum’s 3-D walk-through of select parts of the museum. The British Museum in London has online tours of its Gladiator exhibitions, and also displays its global research projects using a tagged Google map. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., offers video, music and audio podcasts, RSS feeds, online tours and a complete multimedia package on a selected exhibition (one week, it was Pompeii!).

In April, the Indianapolis Museum of Art launched ArtBabble, an archival website of videos from museums across the country, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The videos (of interviews with artists and curators, shots of installations and behind-the-scenes museum activities) are accompanied by informational links, and the site is envisioned as a global meeting point for lovers of art. The Tate Museum in London similarly hosts hundreds of videos on its website that provide extensive information on pieces of art and artifacts.

Of course, viewing art online will never replace seeing the work in person. “The experience of looking at a piece of art is something that is unique and particular,” says Allen. “When you stand in front of the “Still Life with Lemons,” it’s a visual experience; it’s an emotional experience. There is the sense of changing light in the gallery; there’s the sense of the object.”

What the Web CAN do

A world of possibility: Paola Antonelli, MoMA senior design curator, loves the idea of putting exhibitions online. Photo: Robin Holland

At the same time, the Web has become an integral part of a museum’s presentation of its collections and a hallmark of curatorial sophistication. Having a good website is as fundamental as having a good exhibition. “If a museum doesn’t have a good digital presence, that museum really doesn’t exist anymore,” says Allen.

Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, agrees that a website is an important supplement to a show, one that will be archived and available to the public long after the show has been taken down. “Within a show, there are three spaces: the gallery, the catalogue and the website,” says Antonelli. “[They have] different personalities that one has to approach with a sense of design. The book is a linear process; you have to design a sequence. The exhibition is a finite space. The website gives you a complete freedom …. It’s an architectural project in five dimensions.”

In early 2008, Antonelli, working with MoMA’s Web team and designer Yugo Nakamura in Tokyo, built a website to complement the highly successful exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind. A recap of the show is represented in text, which is interrupted by exhibition images that pop up suddenly. Exquisite thin lines spiral through the page, connecting the images. Click on a paragraph of text, and you are taken to an interactive component, such as a computer game that allows you to create monsters in real time, a visual mapping of neighborhood statistics, a mock-up of a sleep chamber for car drivers or details of a proposed dating service that allows individuals to “smell” potential partners rather than use visual stimuli. The website, she feels, helped draw people to the exhibition and continues as a living testament to the show.

“The Internet is a parallel universe that you can explore,” says Antonelli. Web design will be even more important in the future. Curators will need to be adept at working with a museum or gallery’s Web team.
Allegra Burnette, creative director of digital media at MoMA, has worked with several curators on shows, some who are knowledgeable about the Internet, such as Antonelli, and others who are not. She cites one example of a curator who did not own a personal computer but wanted a website for his show. “A lot of it has to do with their willingness to engage [with the Web], even if they don’t know about it or understand it,” says Burnette. “That was a big moment — him saying, ‘I don’t know what this is all about, but I know it’s important.’”

A screenshot from the website of Design and the Elastic Mind. Photo: MoMA.org

For the 2004 Tall Buildings exhibition, Burnette had the participating artists post to a blog (with accompanying pictures) as they installed the show. Burnette also worked on MoMA’s new website, which launched in March after an 18-month overhaul: “There’s a real drive to focus not just on the resources of the museum, but the experience by incorporating visitor Flickr photos, video series from members and staff and insight from behind the scenes of the museum. We were looking at the language, too — not just presenting what we think, but what visitors think. We also wanted to flip it from being text-based to being more visual.”

Can the Web do better?

Gregory Amenoff, a professor of visual arts at Columbia University’s School of Arts and an artist for 30 years, says that having art online is invaluable. “As a teaching tool, [the Web is] extraordinary,” he says. “Just simply, at the touch of a finger, I can bring someone up, historical or contemporary, and I can talk about what it is [the student is] seeing or what they’re not seeing.”

Amenoff serves on the board of the CUE Art Foundation, which gives unknown artists opportunities to have their work professionally curated and exhibited in the foundation’s Chelsea gallery. For each artist, CUE creates a mini-site featuring the artist’s information and images. These sites, which can be customized by the artist, continue to exist long after the exhibition ends and are a valuable marketing tool.

CUE is now looking into creating a 3-D animated model of the Chelsea gallery that could showcase exhibitions that never physically appear in the gallery and are curated solely as a virtual experience. Jeremy Adams, executive director of CUE, says it can be hard to give a sense of scale in a virtual exhibition. He would like to compensate for this by using new 3-D video technology, so the viewer can shift perspective without disturbing the video stream, but the software is expensive.

Adams likes to think of a website as a thumbnail of an exhibition. At the time of this interview, CUE was exhibiting work by the artist Art Green, whose oil paintings appear on blocks of wood that fit together like a puzzle to create large angular shapes. The colors of his works are strong, and depending on where you are standing, your attention is drawn either to the colored shapes that fit together to create beautiful geometric patterns or to the faint shadow images that are painted over the geometric shapes (airplanes, birds, circles, silhouettes) not immediately visible to the eye. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the exhibition’s sense of scale and bold color is not as impressive on the website. The color and resolution settings on computers cannot accurately capture the depth and brilliance of the work of art.

Zarmeena Shah, an artist from Pakistan and a master’s curatorial student at Columbia University, hopes that one day, websites will be able to more accurately represent art.

“No matter how much you say about the real piece of work, and how much print or photographs [or a screen] take away from it, the fact is, they help people to know what’s out there,” she says. “They educate people. Not everyone has access to the real work.”

Jackie Bischof is a magazine journalist from Johannesburg, South Africa, with online and broadcast experience. She enjoys sampling the best of all worlds.