There were several things I was looking for when I headed out onto the web in search of art. I didn't much care whether the site was a "fine art" site per se: whether it was associated with a museum or gallery or well-known artist. And I didn't eliminate any category of site a priori: whether it was personal, organizational, or even commercial (within certain limits: I was not going to choose nike.com).
What I wanted was, first, a site that exploited many of the web's possibilities for simultaneous or serial mediation: I wanted aural, visual, and textual modes, either coherently integrated or clashing in idiosyncratic or suggestive ways. I wanted, second, interactivity not just in the sense that I'd be clicking links, but in the sense that I could actually collaborate within certain parameters in the website: that people could contribute to its content or alter it. This seems to me the way that the web does something interesting with "authorship": not in the sense that it erases the author or shows authorship to be a mere figment, but in that it multiplies the origins of the work into indefinitely many authorships, some of them directly traceable and some of them not. Third, I wanted a website that was well-made both aesthetically and technically, that showed a mastery of craft. It should be clearly navigable, the links should work, and so on. And, perhaps perversely, I wanted the site to be beautiful. That might just be a matter of my mood over the past few weeks: I am looking for some place to rest, and I want less to be challenged than comforted.
This turned out to be a hard list of demands to satisfy. After spending some days scouring the web, I am less sanguine about the state of the art than I was before. A lot of the fine art sites seemed to embody very half-assed and unimaginative uses of the medium: there were a lot of "type treatments": say programs for generating arbitrary juxtapositions of words. Many of the texts and hypertexts that floated over my screen were "elusive" in a Jenny-Holzer kind of way, but at least Jenny Holzer is a writer. I came to believe that what largely separated the art sites from others was a kind of tremendously irritating pseudo-profundity.
But I found what I was looking for at mushmushi.net, which is the site of what is at least nominally a small British record or multimedia company. It is one of the few beautiful sights I looked at, and virtually the only one that combines beauty with serviceablity, so that you're not only happy to be there, but quickly know where you are and how to get what you want. And there's quite a lot on this site; it was one of the few places I dropped into that I ended up wanting to stay inside for quite some time. There are a lot of little things here to play around with.
Mushimushi is above all about the relation of the visual and the aural, or abstract visual art and music. The web is really the ideal context for exploring that relationship. And mushi gives you a number of good ways to play with it. For example, you can create music on an abstract visual ground using little spiky 3-d entities called wibbles: you choose among instrumental sounds and where you place the wibble on the vertical axis of the ground determines the pitch. But more, when you've finished playing, you can record a piece of your own and send it as an aural/visual postcard. There is a place also where you can create an LED sign, which can be translated into a series of musical tones. You can then add your sign/song to a huge collaborative
sign/song that is being made by the site's users. And you can also leave an LED message for the next person who logs onto the site, or send one via email to anybody you please. Try also the little zone where you can get a sample from each song on the latest album by the Headcase, who play in a kind of trance or shoegazer style. The way you capture the song, then hold or release it, is quite beautiful but also simple and useful. I also downloaded a Headcase MP3.
And I like the fact that you can buy mushimushi merchandise and albums on the site as well, as I have become a compulsive web shopper.
Honorable mentions:
Richie Millennium's 13th dimension is chock-full of wonderful comics, haiku, postcards, radio shows, and short stories.
This is the hilarious homepage of MOBA, the museum of bad art.
Tattoo addiction: an excellent tattoo sight to which you can upload art and that links everywhere in the world of body art.
Huge site devoted to graffiti art.
Actual paintings, of intense beauty.