The Arts on the Internet: Art, Advocacy, News, Information

 

by Judy Malloy
November 2004

CONTENTS

• Introduction

   

• Part I
• Art and Telecommunications - Early Arts Presence Online
• The Arts Take to the Web

   

• Part II
• The Importance of Original Arts News Online
• Original Arts News Online
• Print Arts Magazines - Online Editions
• Print Newspapers Online
• News Blogs
• listservs
• Some Specific Needs

   

• Part III
• Portals
• Artists' Websites
• Organizational Websites

   

• Conclusions
• Notes

   

• Resources - Selected Links to the Arts Online

Introduction

Ten years after the World Wide Web made the Internet widely accessible, there is a rich and diverse collection of arts websites on the Internet. There is an amazing variety of arts websites produced by arts organizations and individual artists. But as the Web continues to grow--in February 2004, CNN observed that by some estimates, there are now 10 billion Web pages on the Internet--access to these sites has become more difficult. [1]

Print newspapers have permeated the Web environment, resulting in an increase of Internet-based coverage of the higher profile arts. But although the nonprofit arts sector--including emerging and experimental artists and alternative art spaces--has created a strong home page presence, coverage of and access to these pages is increasingly difficult to locate as the Web environment becomes more commercialized. And social, political, and economic art news and advocacy are dwindling.

The Internet still offers what Judge Stewart Dalzell referred to as "the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country -- and indeed the world--has yet seen." [2] Nurturing the survival of this open Internet environment is essential. However in the shadow of consolidation, (Time Warner's merger with AOL for instance, despite some concessions) this thriving and open landscape is threatened by the potential for the loss of Open Access ; by the duplication of the established broadcast and print media online; and by the potential for search engine commercialization and monopoly.

Furthermore, the dot-com bust and the fact that the media no longer extensively covers the promise and development of the Internet are likely contributors to diminished interest in funding new online ventures.

Indeed, Norman Solomon observes in "What Happened To The 'Information Superhighway'?" that "The news media's recalibration of public expectations for the Internet has occurred in tandem with the steady commercialization of cyberspace. More and more, big money is weaving the Web, and the most heavily trafficked websites reflect that reality. Almost all of the Web's largest-volume sites are now owned by huge conglomerates. Even search-engine results are increasingly skewed, with priority placements greased by behind-the-scenes fees." [3]

For the arts in this evolving Internet environment, there are three primary areas of emphasis:

 

1. The encouragement of arts news and advocacy, including creating and funding original Internet-based news.

   In the contemporary Internet environment, encouragement of arts news and advocacy content that speaks both to the art community and arts audiences is an important goal. As this paper documents, there are a few good sources of arts news, information, and interactive forums, but the initial optimism and excitement about an online platform--one that would host arts news that was more inclusive and more accessible than what is available in print, that would provide a place to show and discuss artwork, and that would allow dialogue among artists all over the world-- has only been partially fulfilled. Much Internet-based arts news is print journalism ported to the Internet or news specific to the organization or artist who produced it. There are a substantial number of online sources of reviews, but much of this coverage is also print coverage ported online, and it favors museum and gallery exhibitions, established symphony orchestras, Broadway productions, and well-known dance companies.

   Print-originated news online and the blogs like Artjournal.com that reprocess it bring arts coverage to a wider audience. However, this duplication of the established media online has created the illusion of substantial arts coverage on the Internet. And--at the same time as there has been a demonstrable demise of the kind of serious arts news and advocacy that Arts Wire Current/NYFA Current once offered--this illusion may have lessened the perception of the need for original Internet content that covers the nonprofit arts.

    

2. The encouragement of more individual artists' websites, in tandem with technology help and funding for artists and arts organizations who are creating content on the web.

   The need for encouraging arts content on the Internet is pointed to in "Content and the Digital Divide: What Do People Want?" by Kevin Taglang of the Benton Foundation. "People also want more spaces on the Internet that allow for cultural exploration and development, reflecting unique cultural characteristics and attributes," he observes. "Spaces that allow for interaction on art, music, food and sports would allow people to share information about their heritage and cultural practices." [4]

   Artist and arts organization sites--from Dance Theater Workshop's program notes on contemporary dance; to the Greg Kucera Gallery's extensive artists documentation of individual artists; to musician/composer Pamela Z's site that presents her work with photographs, text, and sound clips--provide a rich source of Internet content that enables their work to reach more people, benefitting not only artists and arts organizations but also audiences.

   In recent years of online reporting on the arts, the author of this report has observed that most arts organizations have Internet presence. But there are still many artists who do not have their own websites. Additionally, many of the organizations that have websites could benefit from help in determining how effectively their sites present content. The initial promise of Internet presence spawned nonprofit technology transfer for the arts--Arts Wire and Open Studio, for instance--but such subsidized technology transfer is now difficult to find.

    

3. Sustaining access to the websites of artists and arts organizations, including fostering a continued open Internet environment, combatting the Digital Divide, and encouraging and funding portal sites that supplement search engine results.

   Although the 2002 Digital Divide Report reported that Internet use is increasing for people regardless of income, or education, the Digital Divide Network pointed out that "the report shows a significant gap in technology access and use based on race and ethnicity. While Internet use among Whites and Asian American/Pacific Islanders hovers around 68%, use rates for Blacks (30%) and Hispanics (32%) trail far behind." [5] Additionally, people with disabilities are less likely to use computers or the Internet than those without disabilities. [6] (In a separate paper, the Digital Divide Network also observed that data on Native American uses of the Internet was excluded from the report. [7])

   Because they represent and reach diverse communities, the arts online are an important tool in widening Internet participation. Nurturing the arts online should be a part of wider programs to combat the Digital Divide.

   A contingent area of access concern is search engine access to nonprofit culture--likely to be affected both by the sheer number of websites and by commercialization.

   In a Cultural Policy & the Arts National Data Archive (CPANDA) study that examines the role of portal sites, (defined in this CPANDA report as large search engine/content gateways such as Yahoo and Excite) Eszter Hargittai notes that "as portal companies become completely dependent on outside advertisers and retailers for revenues, they will favor content that caters to the mainstream over very specialized material to guarantee the widest possible popularity with Web users." [8]

   In addition to commercialization and consolidation, the trend for broadband to become the major access method for the Internet -- potentially creating a situation where the Internet becomes more like cable with access controlled by a few corporations--threatens the thriving and open Internet landscape. Nurturing the survival of an open Internet environment is essential.

   "And today, the democracy that was once the Internet is beginning to look more and more like an oligarchy. The recent attacks on the traditional ownership/diversity safeguards, moreover, waged in the courts and at the FCC, represent an effort on the part of a handful of entertainment conglomerates (AOL Time Warner, General Electric/NBC, Disney/ABC, Viacom/CBS and News Corp/Fox among them) to extend their hegemony into the digital frontier," Jeffrey Chester and Gary O. Larson warn in their paper, "A 12-Step Program for Media Democracy ," which sets forth courses of action for preserving a continued nonprofit presence on the Internet. [9] "There is no guarantee, in other words, that the spirit of competition, diversity and democracy that has long been the hallmark of the traditional, 'narrowband' Internet will prevail in the broadband future."

    

Reporting on how the arts developed online in this country and what the current landscape looks like, incorporating some feedback from readers of arts news, this paper explores these needs and suggests ways of nurturing the arts online and making the arts online more accessible in the future. It is also an initial step in creating a mega-list of arts news sources on the Internet.

The emphasis is on the nonprofit arts landscape in the United States, but a few international resources are included as examples of model content providers. Observations about website content are generally based on over ten years of arts reporting. However, It should be emphasized that the Internet is more malleable than print publications, and thus details of site interface and content may have changed since this paper was written.

PART I

Art and Telecommunications - Early Arts Presence Online

Artists and arts advocates were among the earliest non-high-tech communities to understand the potential of telecommunications.

In the 1970's, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz emphasized international connections in globally situated two or multi-way projects such as Satellite Arts Project (1977) that connected dancers in different localities. [10] In 1984 their Electronic Cafe created the cybercafe concept. Among other early telecommunications artworks was the Send/Receive Project (1977), with participants including Willoughby Sharp, Liza Bear, Keith Sonnier, and Carl Loeffler. [11]

The Native American community recognized early the importance of the Internet for both communication and situating art in a wider context. In South Dakota, Anne Fallis hosted the Dakota BBS, a project of American Indian Telecommunications. Artist Lori Ann Two Bulls' digital drawings were distributed on this network in the early nineties, before the web became prevalent. [12]

In the mid-eighties, before the advent of the World Wide Web, in the San Francisco Bay area, Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL hosted a discussion forum, a menu of interactive online artworks, and an ezine. [13] Probably the first arts news ezine, FineArt Forum began in 1987. Leonardo collaborated with FineArt Forum and initiated F.A.S.T. on the WELL in 1989. F.A.S.T. was conceived as an online information resources for news and opportunities about art and technology. It used FineArt Forum as a base and augmented it with menu-driven information resources. [14] In New York City, Echo, founded in 1990, hosted artists and art-based conversations. The Thing, a BBS focusing on contemporary art and cultural theory, was created in 1991.

Arts Wire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, began in 1992. In its early years, it was a text-based conferencing system and an ezine--providing access to news, information, and dialogue on the social, economic, philosophical, intellectual, and political conditions affecting the arts and artists. When the Web began taking off in 1994, Arts Wire not only created an extensive website but also offered website hosting as a part of its membership. Arts Wire's "Map" page provided an extensive portal to arts presence on the World Wide Web. Additionally, Arts Wire provided training for online access and applications. With the exception of the ezine, Arts Wire Current, NYFA closed Arts Wire in 2001.

From 1996-2000, another program, Open Studio, The Arts Online was developed by the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Benton Foundation. Open Studio partially funded organizations with a goal of training the arts community to use the World Wide Web to build audiences, network, and gather information. A major emphasis was on creating physical access--i.e., places where people who did not have computers could come to access the Internet. The Open Studio website hosted both discussion and links to developing websites by members.

Although Arts Wire ceased in 2001, Arts Wire's ezine continued publication. It was originally called Hotwire, was renamed Arts Wire Current in 1995, and continued under the name of Arts Wire Current until mid November 2002, when it was renamed NYFA Current. From 1996-2004, under the editorship of the author of this report, Current expanded its readership, reaching a large niche audience (over 5,000 via listserv; about 25,000 Web hits per issue) with news and arts information not covered by the major media--such as new music, alternative art spaces, performance art, arts advocacy, small dance companies, artists websites, and much more.

One of Arts Wire's initial goals was to provide timely arts news that was not available elsewhere and was vital to the nonprofit art community. The original idea--later implemented by systems such as Rhizome.org--was to create the ezine from news feeds from community members. Over the years Current grew to be the major source of arts news and advocacy online--defining advocacy broadly as not only including issues of national cultural policy but also including issues of interest to individual artists, as well as in-depth articles on the work of many contemporary artists. With the premise that the arts community is intelligent and informed, Current took an approach of presenting information-based news that integrated journalism with some of the concepts of the academic paper (where statements are referenced) and that also incorporated aspects of the Internet medium, such as links and interactively created content.

The Arts Take to the Web

Beginning in the mid-nineties, artists and arts organizations began to situate their own home pages on the World Wide Web.

In a 1997 interview on the Interactive Art Conference on Arts Wire, artist/Web designer/teacher Jeff Gates pointed out the importance to artists of the Internet platform. "...[A]rtists have the opportunity to help define this medium," he stated. "Access to our work has the potential to increase 100 fold or more. We can bypass the narrowly opened door of the art market (which offers a very small opportunity to succeed) and even the wider (but still small number) of opportunities offered by the alternative exhibition site world...." [15]

The earliest artist's websites included Antonio Muntadas' The File Room; (1994) Judy Malloy's Cyberagora; (1994, including "l0ve0ne" and "Uncle Roger") Susan Farrell and Brett Webb's Art Crimes; (1994) Muriel Magenta's The World's Women Online; (1995) and Shu Lea Cheang's Bowling Alley (1995) (Note that many early sites have been updated, so they no longer have the look and feel of the early web.)

Among other early artist websites were Jodi; Anna Couey; Nina Sobel and Emily Hartzell; Pauline Oliveros; Steven Durland; Coco Fusco; David and Gisela Gamper; Richard Bolton; Takahiro Iimura, Elsa Dorfman; Lowell Boileau; and Douglas Davis.

Early Web Projects by artists included Arts Wire's Interactive Art Conference, NewMusNet, and California Conferences; Richard Finkelstein's Arts on the Line; GOL's Broom Closet (Gary O. Larson); Herb Levy's New Music Web Tour; Ken Rohrer's Incredible Art Department; and Ann Rosenthal and Stephen Moore's Infinity City.

Benjamin Weil established ada'web in the Spring of 1995 with projects including Jenny Holzer's "Please Change Beliefs."

Dia Center for the Arts began commissioning Artists' Web Projects in 1995 with projects including a collaboration by Constance DeJong, Tony Oursler, and Stephen Vitiello, "Fantastic Prayers"; and Komar and Melamid's "America's Most Wanted."

Long-running sites, such as Dia's, are essential in making sure that Internet art continues to be accessible and in preserving the history. For instance, the Walker Art Center has also archived several early Internet works on its Telematic Timeline. (However, it is now very difficult to find this and other net art from the Walker's top page.)

One of the first arts organization websites was the ANIMA (Arts Network for Integrated Media Applications) site. Begun in 1993, it was based in Vancouver and headed by Derek Dowden. ("Making Art Online," which was originally hosted by ANIMA, is now on the Walker's Telematic Timeline) The Louvre's website was one of the first museum websites. Other museums online early included the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago had an early website, which was the initial host for "The File Room."

It should be noted that due to the Web publishing practice of constant updating in which the current iteration replaces old pages, early organizational websites are not well documented. (By contrast, although they are sometimes updated, artworks are more likely to still carry the date of their original creation.) The Internet Archive's WayBack Machine, which provides access to archived versions of websites, is providing a much-needed resource in this respect.

Although the earliest years were not available, a December 1996 version of the Arts Wire Map was retrievable from the Internet Archive's Way Back Machine. This December 1996 iteration of the Arts Wire Map lists about 175 arts websites. Among the many Arts Wire organizational members that had websites by the end of 1996 were the American Music Center; Association of Hispanic Arts; Audio Description Home Page; Bronx Arts Council; Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs; The Clay Studio; Colorado Council on the Arts; Cranbrook; DanceUSA; Dance Theater Workshop; Diverseworks; Frank Silvera Writers' Workshop; Illinois Arts Council; The Joyce Theater; Junebug Productions; The Kitchen; Legion Arts; Mobius; National Assembly of State Arts Agencies; National Arts & Disabilities Center; The National Endowment for the Arts; The New York Foundation for the Arts; On the Boards; Opera America; P.S. 122; Poets & Writers; Seattle Art Museum; School of the Museum of Fine Arts: Artist's Resource Center/Career Services; Society for Photographic Education; Soundout, a new-music ezine; TAAC: The Association of American Cultures; Third World Newsreel; Virginia Commission for the Arts; Visiting Artists Program, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Walker Art Center Performing Arts; Webster's World of Cultural Democracy; Women's Studio Workshop; and The Writer's Voice of the West Side Y.

The extensive amount of time spent by Arts Wire staff, headed by Director Joe Matuzak, in training artists organization was an important factor in the solid arts presence online in this era, as were Arts Wire resources such as SpiderSchool, created by Beth Kanter.

The Importance of Original Arts News Online

For the nonprofit arts, among the functions that arts news serves are to report on issues and controversies not covered by the mainstream press; to bring the community together; to report on the vital place of the nonprofit arts in our society; to make sure that opportunities and funding for the nonprofit arts are known to the community; and to provide coverage of the many artists, art spaces, and events that are important contributors to our culture, but whose work is so often overlooked by the mainstream media. Also of importance is bringing the voices of artists--who in times of crisis present alternative views--to a wider audience.

As the National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP) notes in the mission statement on its website, "Arts journalism is indispensable not only to public awareness and understanding of creative expression. It informs the ways cities and regions relate to their artistic and cultural resources, and make decisions about investing in them. On a broader canvas, arts journalism is a bridge to Americans' perception of the cultural environment at home and internationally."

For the purposes of this report, a broad approach to arts news has been taken--one that encompasses material that might be considered feature material in a newspaper. However, even with this broad definition of news, Internet-created news for and about the arts community is not prevalent, particularly news and advocacy for a national audience that covers the nonprofit arts, including alternative art spaces, emerging artists, and experimental art forms and particularly in organized, continually updated and reliable sources that are not beholden to government interests. (For instance, because their mission encompasses cultural agency funding, the large arts advocacy websites are seldom critical of National Endowment for the Arts policies.)

There are a few sites that create original arts news specifically for the Internet. There are a few sites hosted by print art magazines that expand their print coverage. There are many websites created by arts organizations and artists. But there are very few websites and listservs with substantial original arts news created on the Internet for a national or international constituency.

Quite a few newspapers include arts coverage in their online publishing model, and both the presence of the major newspapers and broadcasters on the Internet and the presence of art blogs--which digest and link to their news and thus create a larger audience--have greatly increased access to arts coverage. However, newspaper coverage is, to a certain extent, audience-share driven, and it tends to give more coverage to well- known artists and venues. Furthermore, because a substantial print media presence could be taken as a sign that the arts are well covered on the Internet, the influx of print arts coverage on the Internet could have a stifling effect on the growth and funding of arts news that covers the nonprofit arts.

Indeed, in the past few years original news on an organized and national basis has dwindled on the Internet.

For example, due to funding issues, Artery the Aids Forum is no longer being published. After over ten years of publication, FineArt Forum stopped publishing in 2004, also due to lack of resources. ArtDaily ceased publication in June 1994 after eight years of publication. Beginning in 1992 at a time when the technology was difficult to use, Arts Wire did not survive the late twentieth century economic climate for the arts. When NYFA took NYFA Current (formerly Arts Wire Current) in house in April 2004, it changed focus. Although its segments on and by individual artists are of interest, Current is now much shorter and much less comprehensive. It generally does not feature either advocacy or current news.

Creating an Internet arts news climate that is not dominated by big media is not only important because of the need to foster diverse coverage of the nonprofit arts, it is also important in utilizing the Internet medium to its fullest. For the most part, arts news written for the print media and then ported to the Internet is less likely to take advantage of the Internet's capability to allow a niche audience to see artists and arts forms in greater detail--such as in-depth features that include many artists who would not otherwise receive much coverage or in-depth advocacy content that is of interest to a niche audience and is vital to the nonprofit arts sector.

Original Arts News Online

Although sources of Internet-created arts news with national impact are not plentiful, there are a few that are worth visiting.

For instance, the websites of several national advocacy agencies -- Americans for the Arts, The National Association of State Arts Agencies, (NASAA) and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC)--host advocacy news as well as news for and about their constituencies.

On its website and associated listservs, Americans for the Arts provides updates on national advocacy issues such as national arts funding. The "Legislative News" section generally has a focus on National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funding. The "Arts News" section is digested print media news prepared by ArtsJournal.com. Americans for the Arts also hosts The National Arts Policy Database with access to research reports. Additionally several Americans for the Arts programs--such as the Public Art Network (PAN) and Animating Democracy--provide news and/or features of interest to and about their constituencies. PAN produces the PAN listserv as well as site-hosted resources and links to other resources for public art. The Animating Democracy section of the Americans for the Arts website features news and events about "artistic dialogue that enables and encourages civic dialogue." Although the Americans for the Arts site is rich in content, it is sometimes difficult to find everything that is available. An accessible site map with brief descriptions and directed access to each resource would be helpful.

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), the membership organization for the nation's state arts agencies, hosts advocacy news with a focus on arts funding, both national and state. An "Art Clips" section provides links to print and media coverage. On a recent visit, many of them were of interest, including in mid-June a link to an article on Reagan's mixed cultural policy legacy (from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) and a Canada East article on how Canada's artist community is protesting politicians who are not including cultural policy in the current Canadian election debates. NASAA's website also features arts and arts organizations from member organizations, Web reviews, and a site map that makes the website's content accessible.

The National Coalition Against Censorship hosts news and features about censorship in the arts and humanities. The site includes "Censorship News Headlines"; "Upcoming Events"; "Items of Interest"; and resources from the Arts Advocacy Project, including a database of legal cases in the arts, a timeline of censorship in the arts, and "Art Now" (artists' responses to sociopolitical events).

Three other sites providing original arts content are Community Arts Network (CAN), the American Music Center (AMC), and Voice of Dance. Each offers a somewhat different approach. CAN, reflecting its community arts mission, is art-in-the-community oriented and focuses on features, digested news, conversation, advocacy, and interactive dialogue among artists and community arts practitioners. The AMC site is information-intensive and artist-centered with a wide variety of curated material; and Voice of the Dance, in its most current iteration, has a more commercial model--danceware ads, for instance, combined with useful information for dancers, events calendars for the dance audience, and reviews of performances. All three sites feature informative top pages that lead to diverse kinds of information.

Directed by writer Linda Frye Burnham and visual artist Steven Durland, former editors and publishers of High Performance magazine, the Community Arts Network (CAN) was initiated in 1999 through a partnership between Art in the Public Interest and the Virginia Tech Department of Theatre Arts' Consortium for the Study of Theatre and Community. It has evolved into an extensive website for community-based arts. The CAN Reading Room is an online library of writing and links about community-based arts--some of it commissioned and some of it culled from other sources. CAN Conversations provides an online forum for interactive dialogue. CAN also hosts APINews, an arts news blog that points both to articles from CAN and other arts news sources.

As the description of the May 2004 issue suggests, APINews' coverage is wide-ranging: "APInews #58 directs your gaze to the Republican and Democratic Conventions, the art of resistance, funding levels, wartime writing from the military, poetry's $100-million quandary, a new black national theater, arts impact studies, Hip-Hop poetry in detention centers, terrorvision at Exit Art, learning journeys, Black Panthers, resignations, arts advocacy, art and dead presidents, Pastors for Peace, 1 Breath Time, new books on cultural lockdown, Richard Florida's best defense, a great Alabama job, Caribbean mythology, reversing vandalism and funding for the preservation of African-American arts and culture."

The American Music Center's online information resources provide an excellent model for the dissemination of arts information online and for the encouragement of the work of artists and arts organizations in an online format. Among other resources, AMC's website hosts NewMusicBox.org, a Web magazine for new American music. NewMusicBox issues cover a wide range of topics, with some advocacy and politics and a major focus on American composers and their works. For instance, A recent issue, "Plucking Great: The Guitar Issue," guest edited by Stephen Griesgraber, celebrated "the pluralistic role of the guitar" with segments including an audio panel, articles, and features on composers and musicians.

"NewMusicBox, writes Richard Kessler, executive director of the American Music Center, "is the American Music Center's response to the diminished media coverage of new music. In this Information Age, we were gravely troubled over the distinct lack of any communications and advocacy vehicle for this remarkable art form...."

The top page of AMC's website features news about AMC programs as well as other news of interest to the new-music community. For instance, on June 1, 2004, news on the front page of the website included "40th Annual American Music Center Awards"; "National Performing Arts Convention Open to Composers"; "AMC Awards $32,300 to CAP Grantees"; and "Kronos Quartet Under 30 Project," among other news briefs.

The AMC website also hosts NewMusicJukebox.org, an online library of scores and recordings of new American music and selected listings from Opportunity Update, a monthly listing of opportunities in new music, including calls for scores, competitions, and other performance information.

Voice of Dance has changed its focus somewhat, and it no longer features as much news as formerly. The current focus is on reviews of performances. The site also hosts information about auditions and jobs for dancers and a searchable events calendar. Voice of Dance has a San Francisco Bay Area base, but it also covers other areas, featuring both ballet and modern dance. Well- known companies tend to receive more coverage on this site, although there is also some coverage of emerging groups. Of particular interest is a BBS that features informal reviews by the dance community.

Print Arts Magazines - Online Editions

Although their content tends to expand coverage for higher profile artists and art organizations (often not the nonprofit and/or alternative arts), the online arts news environment has been enriched by the increasing presence of print arts magazine websites, particularly those that have created Web publication models that expand their print publication coverage in some way.

Publishing models for print arts magazines online range from news-intensive online sites such as Back Stage; to online sites that include added content, such as Art Forum; to sites that mainly promote the print magazine, such as Dance Magazine.

ArtForum.com has created an extensive online site. It includes an online forum section that hosts interactive discussion of reactions to and descriptions of current exhibitions; "Critics Picks" (short reviews); and "Museums" (short reviews of museum exhibitions). As with the print magazine, coverage tends towards high-profile artists and museums and galleries. However, there is usually some coverage of alternative arts spaces and emerging artists as well. Of particular interest is the "10-20-30-40" section that reprints articles that appeared in the magazine from as far back as 40 years ago--for instance, Harold Rosenberg on the problems of art criticism (1964), Julian Schnabel on style and expression (1984), and Rhonda Lieberman on Karen Kilimnik (1994). ArtsForum.com also features "In Print" (a table of contents for the print version of Art Forum), as well as selected articles from the print version. "News" and "International News" blogs link to newspaper arts coverage.

One of the first arts magazines online, Back Stage covers some arts advocacy, with a recent issue (June 14, 2004) featuring an article on artists' audit rights legislation in California. National arts funding is also regularly covered, and there is a link to legislation tracking information. Performing events coverage--East Coast, West Coast, Chicago, Florida and Las Vegas--tends to favor major theaters and performing arts centers. There is not much coverage of smaller or experimental theaters.

Dance Magazine hosts a website that is mainly a promotion for the print magazine. However, in addition to the contents of the print magazine, it features a searchable calendar, a searchable Dance Annual Directory, and in-house news. Archived issues will be available soon.

Among other print arts magazines with online coverage are Opera News Online, Playbill Online, and Publishers Weekly.

There are many literary magazines online, so many that coverage would require a separate paper. They range from The New Yorker--which now hosts Web-only reviews, features, and audio-clips of literature readings, as well as The New Yorker Film File that includes nearly two thousand short reviews of films released from 1990 to the present-- to Bamboo Ridge, Journal of Hawaii Literature and Arts that features poetry and fiction on its website, as well as event listings and reviews.

Print Newspapers Online

Newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle now port much of their arts coverage online.

As noted earlier in this report, the fact that the Internet has made such coverage much more widely available greatly enriches the online environment, and the fact that the newspapers are making this content available online is an important service to the arts community and arts audiences. However, at the same time, if this coverage is perceived as fulfilling the entire need for arts news online, it may serve as a deterrent for the development of arts news online that supplements the coverage of the major media.

The New York Times online edition provides substantial arts and culture news that covers all the arts. Coverage varies, but in general, from a nonprofit, alternative, and emerging arts point of view, coverage is relatively good. However, there are areas, such as new music, that do not always receive adequate coverage. And, not unexpectedly, New York City-based arts generally receive the most coverage. Arts content is easily accessible from links on the paper's top page.

The Washington Post does not present as much arts coverage as the Times. Nevertheless, particularly in its Museums and Galleries section, it features solid arts coverage. Probably because of its Washington location, the Post regularly covers national arts issues. However, coverage of new music, the nonprofit literary arts, alternative art spaces, new theater, and contemporary dance is generally not substantial. Arts content can be easily accessed via links on the top page.

The Chicago Tribune features a substantial amount of arts coverage. Much of the coverage is devoted to high-profile artists and organizations, but there is also a respectable amount of coverage of alternative art spaces and emerging artists. Music critic John von Rhein covers a fair amount of new music and new compositions. The Tribune's list of arts critics and their recent articles provides a useful entryway to their arts coverage (which can be otherwise difficult to locate on this site).

The San Francisco Chronicle's visual arts coverage is good. Literary arts coverage is an interesting mix that occasionally includes alternative presses, and the Chronicle also features some advocacy news. New music coverage is not substantial. Dance and theater coverage are respectable, with some nonprofit and alternative coverage. Arts content can be easily accessed via links on the top page.

The Los Angeles Times also carries a fair amount of arts coverage. However, when this reporter tried recently to register, it not only asked for date of birth but also for income range, and I chose not to complete the form. Print newspaper Internet publishing models are beyond the scope of this paper, but it should be noted that many users are understandably reluctant to disclose personal information. Furthermore, it is possible that newspaper tracking of user reading habits is not always fully disclosed on their website registration forms.

Newspapers of mid-sized and smaller cities--from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to the Miami Herald to the Santa Fe Reporter--also host arts coverage on their online sites. Because their print editions are not available nationally and because they provide exposure for artists and arts organizations from their localities, in many years of covering the arts using online sources the author of this report has found that newspapers from mid-sized cities can be good sources of coverage of emerging artists, and small and/or alternative venues. Additionally, the local arts advocacy issues that these papers cover are often of interest to other communities facing the same problems.

Alternative weeklies--including the Boston Phoenix, the Village Voice, the Nashville Scene, the Detroit Free Press, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the LA Weekly--also port arts news from their print publications online. Although it is New York City-centered, the Village Voice's coverage of visual arts, dance, theater, and music extends to alternative artists and spaces. But--with the exception of good coverage of local bands and the local club scene--regular coverage in the alternative weeklies does not always stray from the same coverage of better-known venues and artists that their print counterparts carry. However, many of the weeklies host in-depth progressive investigative reporting that from time to time includes arts issues, such as artists' housing in urban environments.

In summary, Internet publishing models have brought a much wider audience for print arts news. But for the most part newspapers have replicated their print coverage online rather than using the Internet to expand their coverage of emerging artists or the art spaces that present them. This means that the many thousands of artists and arts organizations that are not covered by the print media are still not covered, despite the opportunity that the Internet offers for expanded coverage.

News Blogs

Newspaper arts coverage is promoted on the Internet, not only through the websites of the newspapers themselves, but also through news blogs (sometimes called weblogs) that digest arts news and than link to the articles themselves.

The seminal Edupage, published since 1993 by the Educom Consortium, summarized education news from all sources and has been an important model for weblogs that came later. Since it began in 1999, ArtsJournal.com has provided an extensive digesting service of mostly print arts news from newspapers. Available both via the Web and listserv, the service is widely read by arts managers.

"It is very comprehensive. I read it daily," Jody Horne-Leshinsky, marketing director, Broward Cultural Division in Florida, told this reporter.

"I always read the Free Weekly Top Stories Newsletter emailed by ArtsJournal.com because it gives an excellent overview of the latest arts news. I will then click onto the story links that interest me and read these articles online. I don't have a lot of time for reading, so I appreciate that ArtsJournal.com directs me quickly to relevant 'news I can use,' and I don't have to do a lot of searching and scanning for information. The service also does a great job of keeping one up-to-date about cultural matters in a general way," commented Karen Gerst Communications Officer for the Flintridge Foundation.

However, playwright Cindy Cooper is less enthusiastic. "I started getting ArtsJournal. But its list of articles is overwhelming, and since it provides only headlines, you have to click each one to find out what's really happening. I might skim the headlines, but following the links is too time consuming, and so I do little of it." She notes that the hassle of registering that many newspapers now require make this service less useful for her.

ArtsJournal.com tends to focus on "big" arts--symphony orchestras, museums, etc. Also, it does not include all articles in any one newspaper. Thus readers are not seeing all the coverage they might see if they visited the actual art sections of online newspapers.

Services like ArtsJournal.com are helpful in both organizing newspaper content and in bringing arts coverage to a wider audience. A downside is that the appearance of arts reporting online is magnified--particularly since some arts organizations now use Artsjournal.com digested print news on their site rather than creating and/or seeking out original arts news targeted to their constituencies and to underrepresented artists and arts organizations. Once again, the potential of the Internet to cover the arts more widely -- the difficult issues, the alternative arts spaces, artists and arts organizations, who are otherwise not covered widely, is really not being fulfilled. (For instance, to my knowledge ArtsJournal.com never included any of the many in-depth advocacy articles that Arts Wire Current produced.)

Nevertheless, news blogs are an important part of the Internet news landscape. Among other useful news blogs is ArtScope.net. National but with a Chicago focus, ArtScope.net includes both links to articles in print sources and original and reprinted reviews. Updated every other month, sometimes sooner (it used to be updated weekly), the site provides an entryway to Chicago arts and culture.

Communications-Related Headlines: A Daily News Blog from the Benton Foundation also provides a useful service. It covers media, the Internet, broadband issues, FCC regulation, telecom policy, and other communications-related issues. Additionally, a growing number of individual blogs--such as dezain.net, an architecture weblog (in both English and Japanese) by Eizo Okada--are providing personal and often interesting looks at the arts and culture.

Listservs

listservs--content delivered to lists via email--are easier to produce than websites. They provide direct contact with readers, and in communities, such as the arts community, where mega-bandwidth is not always available, listservs provide information that can be read without the time consuming wait for Web-based images and scripts to load that is experienced by users with older equipment and/or slower connections.

Websites are important for their ability to archive information over long periods, to provide organized gateways for information, to host graphics and multimedia. But an informal query of artists and arts professionals suggests that busy artists and arts administrators welcome arts news content that is delivered to their email boxes.

For instance, an Ohio-based arts administrator comments that: "I primarily read arts news via email. I also go to newspaper and other websites for in-depth news about specific items of interest that come to my attention via enewsletters or email correspondence. I receive enewsletters from Americans for the Arts (AFTA), the Center for Arts and Culture, and NYFA. I am also on a number of AFTA listservs and receive other email correspondence from AFTA and listserv members re arts news, public art opportunities, and job listings."

Artist Adrienne Moumin reads a fairly extensive list of email-delivered news from galleries, museums and artspaces, including 16beaver, MOMA, Whitney, and White Columns. She reads a selection of NYC-based listservs, including Flavorpill, DKS List, FEVA, (Federation of East Village Artists) and Artists Roundtable NYC. She also reads White Cube, Fractured Atlas (artists career information), Creative Moco (local opportunities around Washington, DC from The Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County), and ArtsJournal.com.

Sculptor and Professor Virginia Maksymowicz observes that she finds email more convenient. She is often too busy to remember to check websites of interest to her, such as the International Sculpture Center and Dieu Donne.

Free speech advocate/artist Robert Lederman, who hosts the NYC Street Artists listserv, uses an extensive list of email resources. "I have Google email alerts send me articles on various subjects. In this context, artist, street artist, MOMA, free speech, copyright, the names of judges involved in First Amendment cases etc. Anything to with art and law," he told the author of this report.

The listserv landscape is diverse. It includes listserv components of many of the arts news sites already discussed in this paper and of the arts portals that will be discussed later. There are hundreds of listservs in the arts--from Frog Peak Newsletter (NH-based new-music publisher) to LA CultureNet (LACN), the Los Angeles-area list originally started by The Getty. Many listservs do not have web presence, so it is not easy to describe their content. Because many lists of listservs are outdated, (and many listservs have never been catalogued) it is difficult to adequately report on this landscape. A continually updated list of listservs would be an excellent addition to an arts portal.

Two listservs that serve wide constituencies in the arts in different ways are Museum-L, which is created interactively by reader input, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts E-Mail Forum, which is an edited publication that is created in house and emailed to readers.

Museum-L is a long-running list for museum professionals and students and anyone else interested in the field. The content is created by the readers of the list who post information ranging from funding audio tours to hotel recommendations for conferences to information about artists and exhibitions. All museum-related topics are acceptable for posting, and those who do not want to receive email can read the archives and post responses via the website. Museum-L's combination of open, user-created content with a simple Web-based archiving system that allows searching as well as access by date range, is an excellent model for listserv creation.

Produced weekly both on the Web and as a website, The Louisiana Division of the Arts E-Mail Forum is an informative and regularly updated ezine. Content is created in-house from a variety of sources, including email submissions. The E-Mail Forum features advocacy news, both national and local, as well as job and opportunity listings.

Some listservs--such as Flavorpill, a compilation of listings and descriptions of New York City area events, and ArtPRIDE New Jersey Enews serve geographic communities.

Some listservs--those created by the Latino Arts Network and the San Francisco-based new-music festival Other Minds, for instance--serve communities of interest.

Selected listservs that serve communities of interest are listed with links in the Resources section below. Among others, they include afamfemplaywrights (African American women playwrights/African American theatre), Poets.org Update (news about poetry readings, events, publications), Fado Performance (Canadian-based performance art list), Franklin Furnace Goings On (exhibitions and projects in which the many artists who showed at Franklin Furnace in the past are involved), NAMAC BULLETin (independent film, video, audio and online/multimedia arts), and the list produced by THAW (Theaters Against War).

Some Specific Arts News Needs

Because of the diversity of the nonprofit arts, many different kinds of arts news and information are needed. Informal questions to a few people known to be interested in arts news elicited a variety of responses.

Playwright Cindy Cooper is looking for an in-depth overview that is formatted in such as way that she does not have to spend hours of what could be artmaking time in reading it and following leads.

"I see a need for more information that is already synopsized or is presented in a way that I can read it quickly and save what I need. I want information on events, activities, conferences, developments, funding, activities in varied parts of the country, women and others who are underrepresented in the mainstream media, and, of course, opportunities," she commented. "I'd like to know a little--but not a lot--about academic debates and developments. I'd like to be informed a little--but not a lot--about international activities. I'd like to know something about what is going on in other art forms." She is also interested in announcements or ads about arts exchanges, items for sale, rehearsal space, contacts in other cities, freebies such as tech stuff, groups forming, and other classified ads.

California-based arts advocate Brenda Jew Waters, who hosts a listserv for the Sacramento-area arts, is particularly interested in news about her area. She reports that she reads arts news both in Web and email form, including the California Arts Council's Weekly Update and website and CA Arts Advocates legislative updates. She would be particularly interested in arts news with information about what other states and local arts councils are doing to offset losses in their budgets.

Sculptor and Professor Virginia Maksymowicz would like to see the return of a publication like Arts Wire Current--"a blend of news about art events but also about political and economic issues for artists on a regular basis."

Street artist/arts advocate Robert Lederman is particularly interested in more articles on the positive side of free speech, that is, coverage that emphasizes the benefits of free speech to art and ideas rather than just reporting on controversies.

An arts funder emphasized the need for up-to-date information that provides sources that can be returned to later, saying that "In general, the news I get is 'timely,' e.g. release of a report or promotion for an upcoming event. If I need more info on a topic, I know where to find out more." She also observed that the arts education sector would benefit from a better online presence.

The needs for arts news and information are as diverse as the arts community itself. Thus it is important to look at the online arts environment in terms of creating and sustaining a multitude of sources and resources.

PART II

Portals

As more artists and arts organizations become content producers, there is a great need for many kinds of portal sites that increase access to their content.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! do an incredible job in guiding readers to content. Indeed, in a February 2004 article CNN reports that Google had indexed 4.28 billion Web pages. [16]

CNN reports that the search engine landscape was somewhat shaken up earlier this year when Yahoo announced its intention to stop using Google as its basic search engine. Microsoft is developing enhanced search engine technology. Given the dangers--particularly to alternative voices--of too much consolidation, of giving one search engine enormous control over website access, these are healthy developments.

However, it is important to emphasize that with over 10 billion webpages on the Internet, all websites are not indexed. Furthermore, "weighing" decisions that determine which sites are shown first in search results generally take into consideration such factors as number of hits or number of linked pages -- factors that, for instance, may not result in new musicians, many of whose work deserves much wider exposure, being near the top when search results of a search for music performances or recordings are displayed.

Increasing search engine commercialization is not likely to benefit the nonprofit arts. Because the nonprofit arts are unlikely to have the funds to advertise on search engines, the policy of displaying advertised content next to search results will not favor nonprofit content.

In "Open Portals or Closed Gates? Channeling Content on the World Wide Web," Eszter Hargittai observes that "As companies refine their advertising strategies in response to information they gather through the interactive nature of online marketing campaigns, they devise strategies that are often hard to access from the user's perspective. Advertisements blend in with site content to such an extent that it can be extremely difficult for users to distinguish between the two." [17]

Additionally, although unique names, such as Manchester Craftsmen's Guild or Rude Mechanicals, are likely to lead searchers to their Web pages, searching for the painter William Allen or the painter Jess (who only used his first name) can be difficult.

Because of all these concerns, the presence of arts portal sites that help users find arts content and of meta art link resources--by geographical locality or by discipline, for instance--are of increasing importance as the Internet expands. Supersites that link many art portals, as well as Web rings and Web review publications, are also important.

The word portal is widely used in website terminology, and in fact most of the sites discussed in this paper could be considered portals. Certainly the sites discussed earlier under original news--CAN, AMC, and Voice of Dance--are also portals. Websites discussed as portals are defined for the purposes of this paper as sites that provide access to themed content by providing more than links but with an emphasis on showcasing artists or organizations and/or leading the viewer to other sites that feature artists and arts organization. The sites discussed in this section also share an emphasis on discipline-based, curated, and/or geographic community-produced content.

Portal sites in the arts range from locally based sites, such as the Washington State-based Art Spot; to National sites, such as Book Sense; to discipline-specific sites, such as Women in Architecture.

In early 1995, conceived by Photographer Carl Lew, Art Spot went on-line as a community arts resource -- a portal to the work of South Puget Sound, Washington, visual art and artists. Art Spot currently features a collective of 11 artists and sponsors. It also hosts moderated art discussion forums that attract artists and people interested in their work from all over the world. Additionally, Art Spot includes links to artists, organizations, and facilities throughout the state of Washington. This portal not only serves as a home for a community of artists, but it also reaches out to the wider arts community and to art audiences.

Book Sense also starts with a community, although it is a much larger one--independent bookstore throughout the country. With its own bestseller list, information about new titles, and access to purchasing books online through local Independent booksellers, Book Sense provides an alternative to megamedia sources of books and to megamedia-driven book lists--"a local and national effort to shine a light on the knowledge and diversity of independent bookstores...," the site notes.

Hosted by the Hecar Foundation, Women in Architecture showcases the work of women architects in South Asia. This well-designed site is mostly enclosed, in that it does not contain a large number of outside links. But its photos of the architects, photos and plans of their work, as well as bios and texts about their work provide an engaging entryway to the work of architects who might not otherwise get wide exposure.

A selection of portals is listed with links in the Resources section of this article. Among others, these effective portal sites include Absolute Arts.com (visual art events and exhibitions), AsianAmericanFilm.com, the Cultural Commons (a membership website for cultural organizations created by the Center for Arts and Culture, which includes member's events, jobs, and news as well as a discussion forum), the Electronic Literature Organization, GoTour, (which invites the sharing of information about touring in the performing arts), Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, NYFA Interactive, Pasadena Culture Net, PortalWisconsin.Org, Rainbow Artists (New Mexico-based artists of color), Rhizome.org, the International Sculpture Center, and VSA ARTS.

The Resources section also lists portal sites that host actual artists works, such as Turbulence and ZoneZero, as well as sites created by broadcast media--such as PBS' Art:21 or Fresh Air Online (WHYY-FM/NPR)--that provide online content that supplements their programs.

In addition to portal sites, linklists that just provide urls are useful gateways to the work of artists and arts organizations of all kinds. These sites provide entryways to content that would be difficult and time consuming to find.

A selection of linklists that provide excellent gateways to other websites is included in the Resources. Among them are Artslynx International Arts Resources, Association of Hispanic Arts, the Alliance of Artists Communities, California Arts, Chicago Theatre Directory, Dance Links, Green Arts Web, Native American Artist Resources on the Internet, National Portfolio Day (links to art schools), and the National Association of Artists Organizations' (NAAO) links to artists organizations.

Not only should portal sites and megasites that access portals be encouraged, but also funding for technology help, for staff (updating is an issue), and for design help--ways that would make portal sites more effective and better help them reach their target constituencies--is highly desirable.

Artists' Websites

In addition to hosting actual artworks, the Internet has made it possible for individual artists to create excellent websites that not only display their work but also provide information about their background and upcoming exhibitions/performances.

From composer/musician Eve Beglarian's Open Secrets, an innovative exploration of the relationship between acoustics, music and architecture; to performance artist Tim Miller's colorful introduction to his work and the issues that inform it, artists' websites are among the most interesting and rich resources on the web. Well designed and informative, they are a precious resource that should be nurtured and encouraged. It is important that Internet presence providers remain available to host the sites of artists; that access to these sites be encouraged; and that artists who are not on the Web be encouraged and helped to create their own sites.

The examples of artists websites listed below illustrate the range of artists websites available on the Web and emphasize the need to ensure that all such sites thrive on the Internet of the future.

In Web Phases, composer/musician John Maxwell Hobbs involves the audience in creating an interactive musical composition. "The set of four frames at the top of the page function as targets for the musical tracks listed in the pull down boxes. Select a track for a window and it will begin to play. Each track is a different length and is on an infinite loop; therefore the musical piece created by your choices will constantly change over time," he writes to describe the process.

With a combination of images, photographs, video clips, photo-collages, and information, Meredith Monk's website involves the viewer in an exploration of her work--including "Mercy," her recent collaboration with Ann Hamilton. An innovative hand-drawn interface is a welcome oasis in the desert of commercial websites.

Sergio Hernandez documents 30 years of his work on his website Chicanarte y Que, including social and political events of the 60's and life in barrios of the Southwest. "The limited availability of this type of art work in the market place prompted the artist to fill this void and make this art work accessible to all people who enjoy images from a different perspective," the site notes.

Filmmaker Barbara Hammer's site opens with an effective painted hand on a black background. Each multicolored finger leads to a different section of the site, and the site features information and still photos of her films, as well as links to a wider lesbian community. An order form allows viewers to order videos of her work.

The website of visual artist Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds presents many entry ways to his work, which ranges from the evocative abstract forms of the Neuf Series, which originate from Western Oklahoma canyon lands, to word/idea-based works that strongly react to the treatment of Native Americans. The site includes images of his paintings, prints, and drawings, and it also documents his public art works.

Visual artist Kay Rosen's website simulates the experience of opening a catalogue of her works, from the elegant white cover depicted on the top page to images of works, such as images from her "The Up and Down Paintings" series. Pop-up windows allow access to detail views of the work. Reviews provide another approach to the work, emulating the exhibition catalog format in their formal layout of print and photograph.

Among thousands of other unique websites that bring artists and their cultures of all kinds to the Web are the following:

• The Donna Uchizono Company opens with a romantic photo-collage interface: a dancer's back, a rose, a series of shoes and the words "choose a step." It features an extensive selection of short video clips of the company's work.
• Musician/composer Simon Shaheen's "... work not only looks back on the history of Arabic music, but also continues to push forward, embracing many different styles in the process," the site states.
• Artist/photographer Diane Fenster's site displays digital prints of collaged photographs and scanned images that explore relationships, memory, and medias. In an interview with Arts Wire Current, Fenster observed: "People go to Google and type in 'Diane Fenster,' and they can find out all about my work. Almost every week I get contacted by a High School or College student who is doing a report about my work and that is how they found me. I get emails--very touching, very beautiful from people all over the world who have looked at my work in the web." [18]
• Cheryl Marie Wade, who performs in her wheelchair, documents her work with text and photographs on her website. The website also includes statements that affirm the importance of her work. "Cheryl's work is on the edge--powerful, provocative, pioneering. It nourishes me as a disabled woman and challenges me as a writer and political activist," Barbara Ruth, author, Past, Present & Future Passions from HerBooks, is quoted on the site.
• Carolyn Guyer's collaborative/interactive Mother Millennia is described as "an accumulating body of linked works on the subject of Mother, told from as many different cultural perspectives as possible, world-wide. On this site, all of these works are called stories and come in a variety of forms, including memoirs, graphical narratives, fiction, oral histories, poetry, essays, video, and sounds...."
• In Louisiana Eclipse, M.D. Coverly creates a multimedia narratative: "I only remember two times the moon disappeared. Both of them happened in Louisiana, both on the banks of the Mississippi."

   

• Composer/performer and audio artist Pamela Z has created an effective homepage that includes information, photos and sound clips of her multi-media performance work, which explores the sonic, cultural, physical, and artistic worlds of the human voice.
• The Austin Lounge Lizards' entertaining site introduces audiences to their "inventive style of satirical folk, country and bluegrass".

Organizational Websites

From the Experimental Television Center's Video History Project, an information-intensive documentation of video art and community television; to the continuous sound and evocative photograph, animations, and text that introduce the visitor to SB Dance website; to Visual Communications' Asian Pacific American-community-centered site, arts organizations have created an extraordinary presence on the World Wide Web.

Government arts agencies that host their sites include the national cultural agencies --the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. All three include news about their programs and spotlight grant recipients on their websites.

The state arts councils all have art sites and many of them provide both news about their programs and information on the artists and arts organizations in their states. For instance, The New Hampshire Council on the Arts website features issues of NH Arts News, which covers arts and the arts in New Hampshire. The Massachusetts Cultural Council includes Artists News, a monthly ezine with opportunities for artists and artist profiles, hireCulture.org (job listings), and a cultural calendar that is open to listings. The Texas Commission on the Arts features both Texas arts advocacy news and TCA News. TCANet's News Flash is regularly updated and features useful TCA news for the Texas arts community. TCANet provides a good mix of artist and art organization news and info and provides a pleasurable visitor experience.

Other arts councils listed in the Resources to this report include the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; North Carolina Arts Council; Ohio Arts Council, the Illinois Art Council, Minnesota State Arts Board, New Mexico Arts, the Nevada Arts Council, and the Oregon Arts Commission.

In addition to promoting their own programs, many arts organization websites bring the work of artists to wider audiences. For example, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum hosts the online exhibition Living in the Moment: Contemporary Artists Celebrate Jewish Time, which presents the work of artists whose work is showcased in an ongoing exhibition at the museum.

OPERA America's In the Works website connects composers and librettists with potential producers. Also a place where the interested public can read about new opera and music theater, it provides compelling evidence of the vitality of new opera.

P.S.1's Animations site is a component of an exhibition, which in the gallery's words focused "on the implications of living in an age where visual experience is informed by new technologies, and where the 'reality' of live action film and the imagined worlds of animation have blurred together." The website hosts information about the artists and about the ideas that shaped the show, as well as actual Web animations.

Among others, a few of the arts organization websites listed in this report's Resources are the Drama Book Shop (a source for materials on all aspects of the performing arts), the National Writers Union, the College Art Association, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Chamber Music America, Bay Area Video Coalition; and Theatre Communications Group.

Conclusions

This report has set forth a need for more sources of national arts advocacy as well as a need to increase access to the incredible variety of arts websites in the contemporary Internet environment.

On the positive side, there are encouraging signs that the Internet is being taken seriously as a new medium. For instance, UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism now has a New Media Publishing course of study. The curriculum emphasizes reporting and writing online, as well as website creation. And, on June 1, 2004, the NEA announced that it will establish three NEA Arts Journalism Institutes to focus on "improving arts criticism in classical music, opera, theater and dance." The institutes will be designed for journalists who cover the arts for print and broadcast outlets located outside the country's largest media markets...." [19] Internet journalists are also eligible to apply to the new Arts Journalism Institutes program, an NEA spokesperson told the author of this report.

However, an overview of arts news sources indicates that since Arts Wire Current/NYFA Current was reshaped, there is no comprehensive news source that reports on advocacy--for instance, with in-depth reporting on national funding that not only promotes the benefits of arts funding, but also when needed examines the directions the Arts Endowment is taking. Without this, there is little recourse for artists and arts organizations if confronted by an NEA Chair who wants to reshape the Endowment in a way that is less supportive of the nonprofit arts in this country, or if confronted with a President who stacks the National Council on the Arts with conservatives. Copyright discussions that acknowledge the needs of creators to make a living are also important.

There are interactive forums online in the arts (in addition to those mentioned above, such as ArtForum.com and the Cultural Commons), including the WELL, which continues to host arts and literature conferences. And user-created listservs, such as Museum-L, also provide dialogue. Nevertheless, because of the many important issues facing the arts community, a central online gathering place for artists and arts advocates would be a welcome addition to the Internet environment. In today's Web-based Internet, this would not be as hard to create as it was at the time of difficult access when Arts Wire's conferencing system was created. Challenges include creating a focus on interesting issues that would attract participants and creating an environment that would sustain such dialogue.

Technology transfer for artists and arts organizations is also important--for instance, information and advice on creating and maintaining websites, Internet presence providers that host arts content, and advice on how accessible content is on existing websites. For instance, databases are useful interfaces when there is a large amount of content, but a list can be easier to use when this is not the case. This reporter has encountered many sites that represent artists where the viewer has to know details he or she may not know in order to use the database; or where an actual calendar would be much easier to user than having to search for events by date. Databases are certainly appropriate on sites when there is a lot of information and/or resources. But it would be helpful to augment them with database-generated reports that rescue the viewer who has no idea what to search for, as well as spotlighted entries from the database.

There are thousands of artists and arts organizations online. Artists and arts organizations have produced an impressive amount of art and arts information online. We now live in an age where information is instantly available through search engines. Yet it is not always easy to find an individual artist's or small nonprofit's website. Thus, there is a need to encourage and fund the creation of portals and superportals that make Web-based arts content more accessible. Websites on the model of the American Music Center are needed in every discipline, as are cross-disciplinary portals.

Combatting the Digital Divide and ensuring Open Access to the Internet are also of major importance. In all these endeavors, the need for support for the nonprofit arts online is of major importance.

In their "12-Step Program for Media Democracy," Jeffrey Chester and Gary O. Larson of the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) point to the need to find philanthropic sources to support the work the nonprofit section does online. CDD has initiated the Dot-Commons Concept. In their words:

"Neither a particular place online nor a Web portal nor a collection of laudable URLs, the dot-commons concept acknowledges that the same nonprofit sector that we've protected and promoted in the real world, through tax-exemption and charitable contributions, for example, deserves similar treatment in the online context. Thus we must find new ways to nurture and support public-interest programming--from community information resources and educational applications to cultural expression and social services--that is unlikely to be well served by the commercial marketplace." [20]

They advocate that the nonprofit sector work together, emphasizing that "What's missing is a national movement to weave together the various strands of 'e-democracy'--from community networks to public-access media centers to voter-education websites--and to build a broader coalition involving other parts of the nonprofit sector (including consumer advocates, media activists, social service agencies, libraries and cultural organizations) that have equally as much at stake in the broadband revolution. CDD's Dot-Commons project is a small step in this direction, but much more work remains to be done in this area."

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Notes

1. Associated Press, "Google Adds 1 Billion Pages to Search; Yahoo Bids Farewell to Google Partnership," CNN.com, Feb. 18, 2004, http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/02/18/google.expands.ap/. Back to text

2. "CDA Overturned," Arts Wire Current, June 17, 1996, http://www.nyfa.org/current_archive/1996/cur061796.html. Back to text

3. Norman Solomon, "What Happened To The "Information Superhighway?" FAIR, http://www.fair.org/media-beat/000106.html. Back to text

 

4. Kevin Taglang "Content and the Digital Divide: What Do People Want?" Digital Divide Network, http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/stories/index.cfm?key=14". Back to text

5. "A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use of the Internet," NTIA, 2002, http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/dn/index.html. Back to text

6. "Bringing a Nation Online: The Importance of Federal Leadership New Report Concludes Federal Programs Critical to Bringing A Nation Online," Digital Divide Network, http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/stories/index.cfm?key=248. Back to text

7. "New NTIA Report Excludes American Indians," Digital Divide Network, http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/stories/index.cfm?key=215. Back to text

8. Eszter Hargittai, "Open Portals or Closed Gates? Channeling Content on the World Wide Web," CPANDA, Working Paper #10, 2000, http://www.princeton.edu/culturalpolicy/workpap10.html. Back to text

9. Jeffrey Chester and Gary O. Larson, Center for Digital Democracy, "A 12-Step Program for Media Democracy," The Nation, July 23, 2002, http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020805&s=larson20020723. Back to text

10. Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, "The Electronic Cafe," in Making Art Online, Judy Malloy, ed., http://telematic.walkerart.org/timeline/timeline_malloy.html. Back to text

11. Anna Couey, "Restructuring Power: Telecommunication Works Produced by Women," in Women, Art & Technology, MIT Press, 2003, p. 58. Back to text

12. Couey, "Restructuring Power," p. 72. Back to text

13. Anna Couey, "Art Works as Organic Communications Systems," in Carl Eugene Loeffler and Roy Ascott, ÒConnectivity: Art and Interactive Communications," Leonardo 24 (2) 1991, pp. 127-130. Back to text

14. Judy Malloy, "In This Electronic Medium," FineArt Forum, v. 11, no 11, Nov. 1997, http://www.msstate.edu/ Fineart_Online/Backissues/Vol_11/faf_v11_n11/reviews/malloy.html. Back to text

15. "A Conversation with Jeff Gates," Interactive Art Conference, http://www.well.com/~couey/interactive/. Back to text

16. Associated Press, "Google Adds 1 Billion Pages to Search." Back to text

17. Hargittai, "Open Portals or Closed Gates?" Back to text

18. Judy Malloy, "From P.S.1's Animations website to pamelaz.com, Pamela Z's Portal to Her Work, the Web Provides Continuing Access to the Work of Artists and Arts Organizations," Arts Wire Current, Oct. 1, 2002, http://www.nyfa.org/current_archive/2002/cur100102.html. Back to text

19 "National Endowment for the Arts to Establish Arts Journalism Institutes; Three Sites Will Provide Professional Development for Arts Writers," National Edowment for the Arts website -- http://www.arts.gov/news/news04/ArtsJournalism.html. Back to text

20. Chester and Larson, "A 12-Step Program for Media Democracy."Back to text

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Resources: Selected Links to the Arts Online

(Note: Further and updated resources on the arts online are available at Arts News On the Internet, a project of Narrabase Blue Skies, which offers a curated approach to content on the World Wide Web.)

• Original Online Arts News
  
• Print Arts Magazines - Online Editions
  
• Arts Organizations that Produce Advocacy for Their Constituencies
• Portal Sites
  
• Foundations
  
• Arts Organizations- Governmental
  
• Newspapers, Radio and TV - Online Editions
  
• News Blogs
  
• listservs
  
• Archives of Early Online Publications
• Link Lists

Original Online Arts News

The American Music Center
http://www.amc.net

Americans for the Arts
http://www.artsusa.org/

The Art Newspaper
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/

Community Arts Network (CAN)
http://www.communityarts.net/

APINews
http://www.communityarts.net/api/apinews.php

Culturebot.org
http://www.culturebot.org/about/

CultureWork: A Periodic Broadside for Arts and Culture Workers
http://aad.uoregon.edu/culturework/

indieWIRE
http://www.indiewire.com

Leonardo Electronic Almanac
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/LEA2002/LEA/lea.htm

National Assembly of State Arts Agencies
http://www.nasaa-arts.org/

National Coalition Against Censorship
http://www.ncac.org/

Philanthropy News Digest
http://www.fdncenter.org/pnd/

Voice of Dance
http://www.voiceofdance.org/

Wired News - Culture
http://wired.com/news/culture/

Print Arts Magazines - Online Editions

ArtForum.com
http://www.artforum.com

Art in America
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/
(Table of Contents of print magazine plus a small amount of online material)

Artweek
http://www.artweek.com/

ArtReview (UK)
http://www.art-review.com/

Back Stage
http://www.backstage.com/backstage/index.jsp

Dance Magazine
http://www.dancemagazine.com/

NYFA Quarterly - (New York Foundation for the Arts)
http://www.nyfa.org/fyi

The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/

Opera News Online
http://www.metguild.org/operanews/index.aspx

Playbill Online
http://www.playbill.com/index.php

Publishers Weekly
http://www.publishersweekly.com

Organizations that Produce Advocacy for Their Constituencies

American Civil Liberties Union
http://www.aclu.org

Authors Guild
http://www.authorsguild.org

College Art Association (CAA) News
http://www.collegeart.org/caa/news/index.html

The Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF)
http://www.aivf.org/

American Symphony Orchestra League
http://www.symphony.org/

Arizona Commission on the Arts
http://www.arizonaarts.org/

The Association of Performing Arts Presenters
http://www.artspresenters.org

Bay Area Video Coalition
http://www.bavc.org/

California Arts Council
http://www.cac.ca.gov/

Center for Arts & Culture
http://www.culturalpolicy.org/

Center for Digital Democracy
http://www.democraticmedia.org/

DanceUSA
http://www.danceusa.org

The Foundation Center
http://www.fdncenter.org

Illinois Art Council
http://www.state.il.us/agency/iac/

Institute of Museum and Library Services
http://www.imls.gov

Louisiana Division of the Arts
http://www.crt.state.la.us/arts/

Massachusetts Cultural Council
http://www.massculturalcouncil.org/

Minnesota State Arts Board
http://www.arts.state.mn.us

The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH)
http://www.ninch.org/

Nevada Arts Council
http://dmla.clan.lib.nv.us/docs/arts/

New Hampshire Council on the Arts
http://www.state.nh.us/nharts/index.html

National Endowment for the Arts
http://www.arts.gov

National Endowment for the Humanities
http://www.neh.gov

National Writers Union NWU Writers Rights Project
http://www.unionwriters.org/cnt/cmpgns/cm_wrp_home.php

FOI/Writers Rights News
http://www.unionwriters.org/cnt/cmpgns/cm_wrp_news_2004.q1.php

North Carolina Arts Council
http://www.ncarts.org/

Ohio Arts Council
http://www.oac.state.oh.us/news/artsohio.asp

Opera America
http://www.operaam.org/

Oregon Arts Commission (OAC)
http://www.oregonartscommission.org/main.php

Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
http://www.pacouncilonthearts.org/

Theatre Communications Group
http://www.tcg.org

Arts Portal Sites

absolute arts.com
http://www.absolutearts.com/

American Theater Web
http://www.americantheaterweb.com

African American Writers - Online E-texts
http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/afroonline.htm

Art Spot
http://www.lewimaging.com/artspot/index.html

The Artists Network of Refuse & Resist
http://www.artistsnetwork.org

ArtistsRegister.com
http://artistsregister.com

ArtsEdge
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/

Arts Wire Current/NYFA Current Archives
http://www.nyfa.org/nyfa_current_archive.asp?id=36&fid=6&sid=17&tid=32

AsianAmericanFilm.com
http://www.asianamericanfilm.com/index.html

booksense.com
http://www.booksense.com/

Colophon
http://www.colophon.com/

Council of Literary Magazines and Presses
http://www.clmp.org/

The Cultural Commons
http://www.culturalcommons.org/sponsors.cfm

The Electronic Literature Directory
http://directory.eliterature.org

Electronic Poetry Center
http://epc.buffalo.edu

Fado Performance
http://www.performanceart.ca/

FilmMakers
http://www.filmmakers.com/

First Nations Art
http://collections.ic.gc.ca/artists/

Fractured Atlas
http://www.fracturedatlas.org/

GoTour
http://www.gotour.org/?session_id=40c3a3e0750a4193_29962

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar
http://www.kalvos.org

Latino Arts Network
http://www.latinoarts.net/

Lesbian Photography on the U.S. West Coast: 1972-1997
http://www.sla.purdue.edu/WAAW/Corinne/

The National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC)
http://www.namac.org

NYFA Interactive
http://www.nyfa.org

Other Minds
http://www.otherminds.org/

Playwrights on the Web
http://www.stageplays.com/writers.htm

poets.org (The Academy of American Poets)
http://www.poets.org/

PortalWisconsin.Org
http://www.portalwisconsin.org/

Pasadena Culture Net
http://www.artcenter.edu/pasculture/
http://www.rainbowartists.com/member.html

Rainbow Artists
http://www.rainbowartists.com

Rhizome
http://www.rhizome.org/

G. Schirmer
http://www.schirmer.com/

Sculpture
http://www.sculpture.org/

Turbulence
http://www.turbulence.org

VSA Arts
http://www.vsarts.org/

Visual AIDS
http://thebody.com/visualaids

Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/newsite/index.htm

WebdelSol.com
http://www.webdelsol.com/

Women in Architecture
http://hecarfoundation.org/womeninarchitecture.html

ZoneZero
http://www.zonezero.com/

Newspapers, Radio and TV Online

Yahoo! Newspaper Directory
http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Newspapers/

American Masters (PBS)
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/

art:21 (PBS)
http://www.pbs.org/art21/

Austin Chronicle
http://www.austinchronicle.com/arts

Boston Phoenix
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/

The Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/

CNN.com
http://www.cnn.com

Detroit Free Press
http://www.freep.com/index/entertainment.htm

East Bay Express
http://www.eastbayexpress.com

Fresh Air Online (WHYY-FM/NPR)
http://freshair.npr.org/

The LA Weekly
http://www.laweekly.com/arts/

Miami Herald
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/

The Nashville Scene
http://www.nashscene.com/

The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com

Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/

Saint Louis Post-Dispatch
http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment

Santa Fe Reporter
http://www.sfreporter.com

Seattle Times
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/

Seattle Weekly
http://www.seattleweekly.com/

SF Bay Guardian
http://www.sfbg.com/

The San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfchronicle.com

The San Jose Mercury
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/

The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com

The Village Voice
http://www.village.com

News Blogs

artnet magazine
http://www.artnet.com/

ArtScope.net
http://www.artscope.net/index.shtml

ArtsJournal
http://www.artsjournal.com/

AJ Blogs Central
http://www.artsjournal.com/blogs

Communications-Related Headlines
http://www.benton.org/news/

 

Listservs

afamfemplaywrights
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afamfemplaywrights/

American Academy of Poets
http://www.poets.org/academy/contact.cfm

Art Deadlines
http://artdeadlineslist.com/

ArtPRIDE New Jersey Enews
http://www.artpridenj.com/

Artupdate.com
http://www.artupdate.com/

CTHEORY
http://www.ctheory.net/default.asp

DKS
http://dks.thing.net/

e-flux
http://www.e-flux.com

flavorpill NYC
http://www.flavorpill.net/current

Franklin Furnace Goings On
http://www.franklinfurnace.org/resources/resources.html

Frog Peak Newsletter
http://www.frogpeak.org

LA CultureNet
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laculturenet/

Latino Arts Network
http://www.latinoarts.net/

The Louisiana Division of the Arts E-Mail Forum
http://www.crt.state.la.us/arts

NAAO e*news
http://www.naao.net/

NAMAC BULLETin
http://www.namac.org/signup.cfm

NHA-Anounce