Next month, the museum's acquisition committee is expected to add CD-ROMs containing Razorfish Subnetwork and at least one other site to its permanent collection. Curators believe it will better document work made using Java technologies. We want to get there before it becomes a commercial thing that reduces it to a simpler, less interesting form. The museum is sounding the depths of the Web's artistic legitimacy, and seems to be setting a very preliminary aesthetic canon for Web development.
Practitioners welcome the institutional seal of approval.
After all, film existed for 50 years before post-war intellectuals like the editors of the French journal Cahiers du Cinema legitimized it as an art form. For a site like Word, which ceased operation in March, the recognition is especially welcome. The people doing the choosing have deeper and broader historical knowledge about the work they're looking at than most journalists do. They don't only compare Web sites with Web sites, but with all sorts of other well-designed objects from various periods in history. Though the Whitney Museum in New York and others are also acquiring Internet-based work, the art world remains confused about how digital media will be collected and preserved over the long term.