There have been a couple of articles over the last couple of weeks
that caught my attention.  These articles reflect perfectly where my
head has been at for the last month or so.  Unfortunately it’s more
doom and gloom about the Internet and its impact on the visual arts.

 The first, “Artists ponder future of digital Mona Lisas,” discuses the
lack of permanence of the new digital media art forms.  How long
will art that’s strictly digital last in today’s world?  How long will it
be till the newest hardware and software make current digital art
obsolete?

The second is an excellent article over at Hungry Hyaena on art and
appropriation. The upheaval and fallout the Internet has caused to
Copyright laws is still on going.  One passage that caught my eye
was this one.

   “Some technophiles argue that the Internet is a
   communal database that alleviates the need for
   memorization and "old-fashioned" learning. All the
   information is at our fingertips, right? Sure, but we tend to
   use online resources on a "need to know" basis. What
   did the guy who plays "House" say at the Golden Globes
   last night? Who was Cleopatra involved with? Does the
   Clash lyric "rock the Casbah" have anything to do with
   Algiers? Those hyperlinks will help provide an answer, but
   will you remember what you read there a month from
   now, or a year? I doubt it. I recall only a small percentage
   of what I "learn" online and I grew up studying the old
   school way, in libraries with piles of books, card catalogs
   and reams of notes. What about students today, who
   research everything online? It's difficult to apply the
   lessons of history if we don't connect the dots, and no
   number of hyperlinks can replace the coded pathways in
   our skull PCs. The "new" knowledge is comparatively
   transitory, soft.”
  
  
If you put these two thoughts together, you get a forgettable
transient medium, basically it’s  “here today, gone tomorrow”.
What does this all mean to the future of Visual Arts on the net?  In
my mind it doesn’t look all that good.

By the way, here’s a great lecture by Lawrence Lessig on  The
Internet, Creativity, and Copyright.