Art Museums on the Web
In the early 20th century, exhibition design emerged as a new medium within the avant-garde art movements. As new media technologies such as photography, film, and sound recording surfaced, artists and designers, including El Lissitzky, Maholy-Nagy, and Kiesler, became aware of the need for changing the relationship between exhibition space, content, and perception—the need to re-define the museum experience (Huhtamo, 2002).
What resulted were exhibitions in environments comprised of various media and channels of communication. Rather than viewing static works on display, visitors became active participants. These avant-garde exhibitions paved the way for a future of virtual museums, which are similar in regards to their non-linear navigation and required patron participation (Huhtamo, 2002).
Museums around the world have benefited from having a web presence. Due to space limitations within the physical museums, only selected works can be on display at any given time. By adding resources to the web, museums become more visible to a wider audience. There are, however, many factors that need to be taken into account when making museum collections and exhibitions available online, including copyright, funding, and technology.
Art museums exist for the purpose of collecting, preserving, exhibiting, and teaching about works of art, and the web helps facilitate these tasks.
