People with too much time on their hands have invented textual smiley faces, in which colons and dashes and other symbols are used to create ASCII images of Ronald Reagan or Marge Simpson. Some of those people claim that their ASCII images are art. As a professional curator at an Ivy League institution, what do you think?
That is a very complicated question. I look after a collection of old master paintings and sculpture, and I therefore stand in relation to the Internet in a rather odd way, because what an art museum gives to our visitors is -- in the age of the Internet -- increasingly unique. The encounter with a unique handmade object is becoming more and more unusual. Many young people seem to have an attitude about our collections, saying that if a scanned photograph of a painting is made available on the Web, that's a close approximation of actually coming into direct contact with the object. I have a problem with that.
On the other hand, reassuringly, artists are now, of course, creating work entirely within the context of the Internet and online. We would be foolish in art museums not to pay attention to and to watch what is going on. Artists, as always, are moving ahead of the rest of us, in terms of using the idea of visual arts and the Internet, and creating new art with it. Museums are followers, not leaders. Generally speaking, with a few mediocre exceptions, artists are leaders and not followers.
Is Yale planning on including any text-based ASCII art or smiley faces in its collection any time soon?
There is absolutely no reason why we should not that I know of. We have a collection of certain CD-ROMs, and we have certain computers making digital prints -- which are gradually making it possible for artists to produce art as well as prints by much easier and cheaper means. These are invading our collections in all sorts of interesting ways. The further we go down this path, the more exciting the range of meanings derived by the new art and the old.
