The Worldwide Web (WWW) is an extraordinary, if a little unruly, medium for discovery, learning, and collaboration, and it indeed makes sense for art history educators to investigate "Web" resources that might add value to teaching and research activities. Many art students are certainly adept already at navigating this global communication resource: some of them,certainly, are exploring the byways of the Web in committed pursuit of self-enrichment and knowledge.
Still, scholars accustomed to the quiet precincts of the research library are likely to remain a bit skeptical about so celebrated and flashy a tool as the Web, even as they acknowledge its potential value in the study of art history. If we rely predominantly on popular media coverage for information about "cyberspace", it's all too tempting to write the Web off as a garish Generation X fad, an aimless font of "way-cool" visual treats for spacey dilettantes and propeller-head techies.
But this is a reductive and, on the whole, an inaccurate characterization of this global communication resource, although it is undeniable that the "way-cool" constituency deserves most of the credit for the phenomenal growth --and the wondrous visual trappings-- of today's Web. But techies and Net-surfers don't own the exclusive franchise for employing this tool creatively. Today the Worldwide Web is attracting mainstream interest in both institutional and corporate circles. Its academic adherents, in fact, have been quietly using it all along, particularly in the sciences.
What's often forgotten in all the media hype is that the Web originated as a collaborative tool for sharing research findings; with the development of the Mosaic browser it became an ideal mode for sharing scholarly work integrating textual and visual matter. So it shouldn't be surprising that more than a few individuals today are using WWW resources in the service of the arts and art history, where the juncture of discourse and image is at least as important as in high-energy physics or molecular biology.
Regard this essay as a bulletin --or a slate of early impressions perhaps-- on developments that promise to figure significantly in how art history is taught and studied in the future. As a management consultant and former humanities instructor who now does most of his teaching in corporate environments, I come to this discussion as something of an outsider, and my commentary is meant to be suggestive, not definitive. The resources I identify here are characteristic of the Web in their diversity and --much in keeping with Web "culture"-- frequently reflect non-traditional approaches to authorship and scholarly practice. That fact lies at the still center of this discussion and the real-world trends it describes. Make no mistake: the WWW will impel an inevitable process of change in the teaching of all humanities, not merely art history.
Bear in mind as you consider the possibilities suggested here that egalitarianism is the intellectual engine that animates the Web, for better or worse. On the positive side, this means high enthusiasm and collaborative energy, and particularly in contexts where the Web mediates the process of creating and passing on collective knowledge.
Of course, there's a potential complication lurking here: the Web is effectively a classless society where doctorates and other credentials guarantee no inherent claim on audience attention. On the Web, anyone with a germ of interest and access to a server can set up as an online authority on any topic, the arts included.
For some educators, this factor may prove a bitter tonic, because it seems to portend some erosion of traditional mechanisms for intellectual quality control, a populist drift. For players at the other end of the pitch, the Web's egalitarianism may represent a refreshing upwelling of enlightened amateurism, and rich new opportunities for fostering life-long collaborative learning.
The Resource List provided here is a reasonable point of departure for educators interested in investigating these issues and the tools available today for using the Web as an adjunct to teaching and research. The list's six classes of resources identify the predominant strains of activity related to art history on the Web today, and in each case provide the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that serves as a given site's address on the Internet. If you are working with the WWW version of this journal, of course, hypertext links are built in: you may visit a cited resource by clicking on its name.
In its most obvious and utilitarian application for arts education, the Web is a s source of electronic images that can be downloaded to students' or researchers' computers. Images of masterworks are already here in great volume, and more are coming online month-by-month.
But are these digital pictures actually useful? Specifically, are electronic images from the Web equal to high-quality printed sources or to 35 mm. slides for examining art objects not physically accessible to the viewer?
More often than not, the Web simply cannot match the visual quality of traditional image reproduction. The superior resolution of conventional imaging technologies vis-a-vis today's Web-transmitted graphics make non-digital images preferable right now. If educators can provide students with a sufficient range of images in these formats, then the Web is at best redundant as a source of pictures for direct viewing and study.
However, for institutions that don't have extensive image resources in print, transparency, or even CD format, the Web may indeed be an invaluable virtual lending library. Scores of art museums, to identify just one of many potential sources, have created self-presentational Web sites that frequently include sample images from their collections.
Some institutions offer just a few pictures, while others --like the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art (NMAA) or the Dallas Museum of Art-- have put up hundreds. In most instances the online visitor can download images from a museum's server to his or her computer. In the Resource List you will find a selection of museums that make images from their collections available over the Web. The "hot-lists" that I cite in another category of the list provide direct links to many more museums with gateways on the Web.
Even so, not all art museums with Web frontage are particularly generous in the number of images they expose to online examination. Happily (for some observers), there's a burgeoning cadre of "virtual collections" en Web --museums without portfolio, if you will-- that offer more extensive image repositories. These sites often embody the predominant interests and visions of the individuals or teams that have created them. They can be quirky, though usually to the degree to which they operate beyond institutional scrutiny. But of course that's a hallmark of the Worldwide Web as a whole, and by some accounts one of its glories.
At most of these virtual museums the keynote is profusion. The availability of the digital image scanner --not unlike moveable type five centuries ago-- seems to have unleashed boundless impulses to categorize, reproduce, reframe, and share the high notes of our cultural tradition --at least as they are conceived by art enthusiasts with a foothold on the Web.
A good example: Michael Olteanu's Christus Rex. Here you will find a thousand-plus images, drawn mostly from Vatican holdings and primarily works of fifteenth and sixteenth century provenance, but with a generous selection of Classical and Egyptian materials too. In visual terms, Olteanu often presents works from multiple angles, and with a richness of detail and high regard for scale that does great justice to the objects portrayed.
It's difficult to imagine, given the economics of print publishing today, a single affordable book that could equal the visual coverage that Christus Rex manages online. This assertion applies with equal validity to ArtServe, an Australian virtual collection that, among its many other features, supports a massive online repository of prints from all periods. (1)
The French Cultural Ministry's online exhibition of eighteenth century paintings , while a good deal less extensive than either of the foregoing collections, attempts a tight period focus, culling nearly two-hundred images from many different museums across the country.
On an more modest level, the Vermeer site run by computer scientist Roy Williams at the California Institute of Technology assembles high-quality images of the artist's 35 extant paintings that are publicly on view. Williams makes them available --along with information on the museums where the originals reside -- in any of three visitor-specified (file) sizes for viewing and downloading. Another noteworthy site is Jim Pickrell's California-based Leonardo da Vinci Museum, a "public service" collection mounted in association with a commercial Web-presence provider. The collection offers digital images of 13 paintings and a wealth of drawings. There is some commentary as well, mostly of a historical and biographical nature.
These five sites are representative of the range --and varying focal points-- of Web-anchored virtual collections. The resource list will help you find many other image-rich sites. In coming months and years there will be a great influx of similar resources on the Web, and these will include presentations by brick-and-mortar museums as well as institutional and independently-mounted virtual collections. As a collective entity, the Web will soon rival all but the most amply endowed real-world libraries as a source of images of art works both celebrated and obscure. In practical terms the ground rules for downloading images will likely be the same then as they are today: if you like an image, you can take it. (2)
As art students become better acquainted with the wealth of image resources available on the WWW, faculty should expect to see --indeed some will actively encourage-- creative student research using the Web. One likely result: a trend toward online student research papers (even theses and dissertations) amply illustrated with digital images and documented not merely with conventional footnotes but with hypertext links to online sources as well.
The obvious corollary: the big kids can play this game too. We will see significant numbers of researchers and commentators presenting their work in mixed-media, hyperlinked modes and publishing it on the Web. Then, of course, there are the coming Web periodicals, which can create a regular channel for such multimedia academic research and commentary. A glance at the Resource List (notably in its Section C) should convince you that these trends are already dawning on the Web.
The implications of these trends suggest upheavals to come in the scholarly establishment. The representative handful of virtual collections that I discussed above can help illuminate the key underlying issues here. The French and Australian sites are, by traditional academic measure, undeniably authoritative, carefully organized, and overseen by judicious and knowledgeable creators. Where they incorporate analysis, historical background, or scholarly commentary, the online visitor can assume with reasonable certainty that the authors are experts in the field.
Many other virtual art collections, however, are hosted by enthusiasts unblessed with scholarly credentials. After all, how many credentialled art historians does it take to scan in a picture of a masterwork and fit it out electronically for display on the Web? Don't expect a glib punchline here: the correct response is self-evident, and it underscores a more telling potential difficulty associated with online commentary or other discursive textual material in a virtual museum.
For the would-be online art publisher, the Web offers an international platform for a minimal admission price, intellectually speaking. There are no committees checking academic credentials in cyberspace, and often no learned referees reviewing online texts before they become available worldwide. The students who download ideas along with images may not realize this, or may not care.
Departments of Art History need to wrestle with this issue and frame advisory guidelines for students who tap Web resources for class projects. There's not much to be done beyond suasive provisions of this sort, because right now the intellectual freedom that characterizes the Web verges on uncategorical license. There's simply no practical corrective available for error, misinterpretation, or even deliberate intellectual deception. On campuses where the WWW is available, students will use it for study and research in the fine arts. No departmental proscriptions can succeed at putting this genie back in the lamp.
We have not considered, in either this essay or the accompanying Resource List, the innumerable Web sites associated with contemporary art in all its manifestations, a realm far more extensive, although generally more ephemeral in content, than the more scholarly precincts we have treated so far. That's one area where primary sources --in the form of digital, performance, and online "zine" art-- reign. Scholarly considerations are less troubling here, and students will leap at the opportunity to incorporate the study of up-to-the-minute art (equally accessible to student and teacher over the Web) in their academic programs and individual research.
Likewise, the potential of the Web for enhancing productive collaboration (beyond text-based Internet listservs and newsgroups) also deserves evaluation. Consider the potential of mixed-media collaborative Web sites --among art history students themselves, or among researchers within institutions or across institutional boundaries, in joint spaces shared by universities and museums, or by these institutions and private sector entities with a stake in the game-- all of them global platforms for advancing the discipline.
There's not a lot of activity on this front yet, and that's frankly surprising, because the opportunities are legion and there are no barriers to entry. The free-lance enthusiasts who are establishing virtual museums have demonstrated how easy it is to set up globally-accessed Web spaces in the arts. Still, academic departments are apparently not moving quickly to capitalize on the collaborative potential of the Web. One impressive and promising site --and a distinct exception case at this time-- is the Egyptology server at Cambridge, where a "News and Gossip" area provides a platform for ad hoc contributions from informed commentators around the world. Look in here and consider how this sort of benchmark site might be adapted to a broader scope and mission, and how its organizers might integrate the use of mixed-media resources more productively.
Discovery, collaboration, synthesis: if the Web is used creatively, these are the core values that it supports. The rub in all this, however, particularly for art historians, is that Web-mediated knowledge tends to be knowledge-in-process, more aptly approximating the virtuality of the waterfall than the contained reality of the garden pond. Ultimately, how educators take to the Web is likely to depend on personal style. For those who see teaching primarily as the transmission of a consensus-polished body of knowledge, the Web may present more obstacles than opportunities. For the opposing party, it will bring instructional opportunities galore, but these too will come freighted with complications of their own.
Bob Duffy is founder and Managing Director of Strategic Communications, a consultancy based in Columbia, Maryland. He works with corporations and cultural institutions to enhance organizational communication and knowledge management, emphasizing the integration of substantive intellectual capital and digital communication resources. (e-mail: BOBDUFFY@srtcom.com