Your story makes me want to frame everything and burn nothing. Attending museum shows, traveling exhibitions, learning about new materials and techniques requires extensive travel. I believe that external feedback and peer input is the stuff that helps give us inspiration. Stimulation from other artists helped spawn the cubist movement along with the Impressionist period and I feel that we all influence each other to various degrees. Art on the internet is a contemporary source of such stimulation.
Internet websites offer international exposure for the artist on a basis never before possible.
Now we can all see what is being done around the world and build on it. We can visit such virtual exhibits as the Red River Sculpture Society's new Virtual Sculpture. With the new technical advances in web page design, better presentations of art on the internet is just over the horizon. I believe that we will all benefit at some level from art online. The internet has brought out a whole new breed of artists who use the medium capably and exploit it to present their work to a wider public.