| The Guggenheim Foundation is conquering the Internet Art is difficult to consider as a whole. Scattered throughout the world, it coexists with non-art and anti-art. The opportunity to completely and forever immerse yourself in this world and never again encounter anything beyond its boundaries, unless you get tired of it and ask to return, has been provided since the beginning of October by the Guggenheim.com website. This is one of the most ambitious projects of the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Thomas Krentz.
Guggenheim.com is more than just a division of a museum empire. The Guggenheim Internet Project should become a completely new phenomenon on the World Wide Web. It is not intended as a regular museum website that every museum has, nor as a source of additional information, a kind of guide or reference book. The site has a completely independent meaning and claims to fully satisfy the aesthetic needs of a person. Not only fine and online art will be presented, but also music, theater, cinema, and travel.
The site was designed by one of the most famous American online artists - Hini Rashid. He is already familiar to the Russian public from the latest exhibition “Arch-Moscow”, where he presented one of his architectural computer projects. Rashid created not a static site, but a dynamic, living, organic structure. Like the Guggenheim museum buildings, which are masterpieces in their own right and as worthy of attention as the collections, the design of the new site is by no means secondary.
The most traditional part of the site is a huge museum archive, representing about 10 thousand works of art from all the Guggenheim museums and its partners: the Vienna Museum of Art History, the Albertina Gallery and the State Hermitage (the bilingual English-Russian Hermitage website, the best in Russia, was included in 2000 in the top ten museum sites in the world). The pictures on the site can’t just be looked at. They can be called up in any order, according to any parameters: artist, school, country, plot, origin, time of creation, period, style, direction, origin. Down to the dominant color. It is possible to enlarge any fragment of any picture.
Guggenheim.com will feature both virtual versions of real-life exhibitions and exhibitions that exist only virtually. Of all the exhibitions already held at the Guggenheim Museum, two have been selected - “Amazons of the Avant-Garde” and “The Art of the Motorcycle”. Guggenheim's partners will also not stand aside. The Hermitage will show virtual versions of the exhibitions “Byzantium, Sinai, Rus'” and “Rubens and His Age”, as well as the virtual exhibition “French Art and Russian Collectors”, which gives a complete picture of the collections of Shchukin and Morozov.
Guggenheim.com offers an alternative to more than just visiting museums and exhibitions. He is also encroaching on the tourism sector. It offers not only a more or less adequate replacement for travel, but also a brilliant commentary, for example, Frank Gehry will give a tour of the Libeskind building in Berlin. You can get into the renovated Reichstag building without having to stand in a long line. The first to appear on the site will be the cities in which the museums that are members of the alliance are located. So far, Berlin has the most accurate virtual double. Very soon it will be possible to receive constantly updated information about Berlin's cultural life, as well as about hotels, shops, and restaurants in the city - in case a virtual trip still turns out to be not enough. Comments are not taken from guidebooks - this is exclusive and professional information.
The site will develop both its museum part and an archive of exhibitions. It is planned to show an archive of approximately 500 exhibitions that have already been held in museums and have become practically inaccessible. Commercial activities are also provided - sale on the Internet of design products of the Guggenheim Museum, made by famous architects and designers. Faina BALAKHOVSKAYA |
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