Chances are?

[Guilherme Kujawski]

New Museum Joins Forces With Artists' Web Site
www.nytimes.com New Museum Joins Forces With Artists' Web Site
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

In an unusual instance of an established cultural organization taking an
upstart arts group under its wing, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in
SoHo
is forging a partnership with Rhizome.org, an Internet site where digital
artists can exhibit their online projects and crow about their status as
art-world outsiders.
In an arrangement announced last week, Rhizome will become officially
affiliated with the New Museum. Rhizome's staff has already moved into the
New
Museum's offices at 583 Broadway, between Houston and Prince Streets, and
the
museum will provide Rhizome with accounting, clerical and other
administrative
services. The partnership will allow Rhizome to expand its activities and
audience while giving the New Museum's curators access to a fresh crop of
emerging artists.
Lisa Phillips, the New Museum's director, said, "Our audience and Rhizome's
audience will have the potential to cross over and know more about each
other."
In its last fiscal year Rhizome spent about $323,000. Ms. Phillips said the
affiliation would reduce Rhizome's expenses in the current year by more than
$100,000.
But a digital-arts group and a museum, no matter how progressively minded,
can
make strange bedfellows. When digital artists began to create online
artworks
in the mid-1990's, much of the art form's energy was derived from the notion
that the works did not need museums or galleries to reach an audience.
Spawned
by that sensibility in 1996, Rhizome quickly became one of the most popular
Internet sites devoted to the digital arts. It is an online-only meeting
place
where members can announce new artworks, request technical assistance or
argue
over obscure aesthetic issues.
As excitement about digital art spread, museums began to commission online
artworks. After the dot-com boom went bust, though, museum interest cooled
along with the economy. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, for instance,
dismissed its new-media curator earlier this year.
As a result it is not clear whether the New Museum-Rhizome partnership can
be
viewed as a step in extracting Internet art from its tiny niche or as a life
preserver for a floundering art form. Tim Whidden, a digital artist in
Brooklyn
and a longtime Rhizome contributor, said, "I'm wondering if it means a
strengthening of new media, that is, it's being taken out of its ghetto and
put
into a larger art-world context, or a weakening, that is, it can't stand on
its
own legs." 

Guilherme Kujawski







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