The Internet Arts Museum claims to showcase the finest contemporary art in the first exclusive online music, art and literature museum. Through this showcase, they hope to nurture a new system of the creation, business, and distribution of the arts, which is "propelled by the belief that music, art and literature have become vacuous." All works are complete, downloadable and free.
This site was touted in a January 1995 Internet World article, but was a disappointment. The site has an interesting idea/mission behind it, but simply does not deliver. While the available graphics were good, there was a distinct lack of interesting art works at this site. When I first looked at this site at the beginning of March, the only artwork was the image on the first screen, and the only link was one to Netscape's Home page. Now they have an exhibit of Words, Sounds, Photos, Lectro-Art, Motion, and Info. They have entered a lot of text "hype" to the site, which explains what the >site is about and what the works are about. The links to the "exhibits" have a stop in between the opening page andthe actual exhibit, which presents an image, an introduction and another button to the actual exhibit. I did not find useful information on this intermediate step. The Sound Exhibit claims to have the first full length music album available for free on the Internet. I was unable to listen to the sounds due to inadequate hardware and software.
> The Words exhibit apparently will be a series of letters to and from "world traveler/fisherman/philospher" Mike Gruber, but started out with a letter of inquiry to the artist from someone named 'bab' (who appears to have something to do with the organiztion of IAMfree) about IAMfree. I did not find the letter interesting enough to put up on a Web Site for the world to review, however a series of letters might have a different feel.
Lectro-Art was featuring Dave Parmley, who was inspired by eastern philosophical concepts in design and his own hand (you get the connection, if you can see the opening image on this site). He has done the IAMfree logo and another of his works was available for downloading. This part of the museum is more of what I would expect from an Internet Arts Museum. Photo was not working properly and Motion is coming soon. The Info section was very interesting. It talks about the Artists for Revolution through Technology group, provides a guestbook, membership information, administrative information, an archive of applications and players and "links to other swank sites." The links provide looks at the Louvre's Web site as well as the University of California, Berkeley's University Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive Web Site.
It is an interesting idea, and it is obvious that the contacts are working on upgrading the site, but the site needs work.