Considering the amount of things that can be streamed online—i.e., entire lives—it's peculiar how art is a thing that supposedly doesn't happen on the internet. The reasons seem transparent; for some it's a kind of moralism, the belief that aesthetic transaction happens in the flesh, not the digital, or that something vital is lost in virtual spaces (even though many of the artworks I've felt to be profound were witnessed not in life, but in a more archaic form of reproduction: books). For others it's the nervous conviction that people will stop attending galleries and museums IRL, or, my more sinister suspicion, that non-commercial galleries and museums haven't yet figured out how to monetarise online space in the name of Art. The website is thus relegated to being the gallery's most essential promotional tool, and what makes the Naarm/Melbourne-based online publishing platform recess so valuable is how the website is the exhibition space.
iarney Miekus is a Melbourne-based writer.
