Bad Habits - Gallery tour - September 16 2000

I must be getting old; whenever I travel to new cities, I have this inexplicable desire to visit museums. I think it all started when I graduated from college and suddenly there was no one around to encourage me to read something by Henry James. So perhaps this emptiness is what draws me to centers of art and culture — or perhaps it's because so many museums have free admission policies. In any case, when I'm home in Atlanta, a good museum is usually at least 600 miles away, not counting Babyland General, the Cabbage Patch Doll Museum in Cleveland, Ga., which is one of my favorites for its realism and attention to detail. Online, however, the world's best museums are just a screen away.

The online museum world is unexpectedly crowded. The United States alone has at least 790 online museums, according to the Virtual Library Museums Pages (www.icom.org/vlmp/), a privately organized directory of museums from around the world. In fact, the Virtual Library's curator thinks that the U.S. may have more online museums than the rest of the world combined — and he should know. The site has an astounding array of museum links, from Antarctica's McMurdo Historical Society Virtual Museum to the National Museum in Sana'a, Yemen, and tons in between.

I checked out three U.S. museum sites and the site of one of the museums I was recently compelled to visit in London. Here are some of the high- and lowlights.

The Museum of Modern Art (www.moma.org) in New York City has one of the best modern art collections in the world. Its site is less impressive; it only reproduces a limited number of works and is no fun to navigate. Considerably more fun, however, is its children's website, Art Safari (artsafari.moma.org). The Art Safari lets kids learn about a work of modern art and then compose stories and their own computer art images based on those works. Frida Kahlo's self-portrait with monkey, "Fulang-Chang and Me," leads to a game that lets children create their own computer picture of themselves with a pet, using click-and-drop shapes. Picasso's sculpture "She-Goat" inspires an exercise in creating an animal out of household objects.

Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org) is a very sophisticated museum with a very sophisticated site. The Met site is all about customization and interactivity, which they definitely deserve snaps for. If you register at the site, you can create your own customized Met calendar of events that interest you, plus the museum will send you e-mails for upcoming events and exhibitions. Registering also lets you create a personalized Met Gallery with up to 50 images pulled from the 3,500 works the museum has reproduced online. And the site has a strong search engine that lets you peruse those 3,500 images by title, artist, date and even keyword. Bravo!

The National Air and Space Museum (www.nasm.edu) is the most visited museum in the world, according to the guy who runs the pub trivia game at Joe's on Juniper in Midtown. Its website isn't bad either, with photos and information about most of its exhibits, including the Wright 1903 Flyer of Kitty Hawk fame (first successful airplane), and the Spirit of St. Louis (first successful trans-Atlantic flight). It also has an online-only exhibition that focuses on specific milestones in air and space history. The October exhibit commemorates the day the sound barrier was broken, Oct. 14, 1947, with archival photos, video and audio related to the event.

The National Air and Space Museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution (www.si.edu), which also has an interesting site. The site links to the institution's 16 museums and also has exhibits of its own. The Virtual Smithsonian, for example, is a selection of objects and works from all 16 museums on various themes, based on the institution's 150th anniversary traveling exhibition, America's Smithsonian.

The Smithsonian is attempting to digitize its catalogues and add images to all the records. According to its site, the Smithsonian has about 150 million objects in its museum collections, but at any one time, less than 2 percent of those objects are on display. Once the museum completes digitizing its collection, these objects will theoretically be accessible online. Based on my own search, the Smithsonian currently has more than 10,500 objects in its online archive.

The Tate (www.tate.org.uk) in Great Britain is a similar congregation of four museums and collections. The Tate's newest museum, Tate Modern (www.tate.org.uk/modern), just opened this year and has a terrific, well-organized collection of modern art. The site is also comprehensive, claiming to have a database of 25,000 works and 11,500 images, but the most interesting thing about the site is its creativity. Going to the main site will almost immediately take you to a mirror site, Tate Mongrel, that parallels the real website but with a twist: "The Tate's collection Mongrelised into its own past and present with the mud, skin and scabs of the Thames."

According to the site, Tate Mongrel is part of an online Web art project, Uncomfortable Proximity, created by Harwood, a British artist and a member of the Mongrel collective. The site says the project was commissioned by Tate National Programmes, but who knows? It could just be guerrilla art. Either way, the project is interesting and intelligent and sometimes even amusing.