Anything can be art, and art can happen anywhere. But one thing which we might well hold to be self-evident is that it has to happen in public. Looking at art on the internet has certain obvious advantages - you can see reproductions of artworks from all around the world without leaving home, and you can sashay through the trendiest of virtual spaces without the haircut police questioning your credentials with a raised, razored eyebrow.
But it has a few disadvantages as well. Most of the time you'll be seeing reproductions. Whether this is automatically a bad thing is by no means clear, though Rodin, say, probably doesn't look his best rendered down into a million pixels on a flat screen. Some art has been made especially for the internet, but there's often something a bit nerdy about it; it tends to look like one of those diagrams detectives inscribe on perspex sheets in moody serial-killer dramas.
A more serious question is how a disparate crew of surfers who happen to have stumbled across any given website can possibly constitute any sort of public, especially when internet use is by its nature so morbidly solipsistic. Yet art sites can and do invite comment, offer links to blogs, newsgroups and so forth. It's relatively unusual to be buttonholed in the Tate and asked whether you think surrealism was meretricious or told that Willem de Kooning painted like a chimpanzee, after all; one function of "official" art spaces is that they tend to make us behave.
First over the wall, as ever, is the Saatchi Gallery, striving to stay cutting edge as the first generation of artists it championed in the 90s ease themselves into canonical middle age. The gallery's website, has a page called "Showdown", where you're invited to vote on art works posted two at a time in a format clearly borrowed from reality TV and other interactive websites.
Another, Your Gallery (recently redone in collaboration with Guardian Unlimited Arts), invites artists to post their work and chat about it; a third, Forum includes a posting from a man who dislikes Gerhard Richter, and another from a short, fat naturist who'd like to find work as a life model.
All to the good, you'd think; at any rate, the comments posted do seem to be positive on the whole, though encouragement is often offered in slightly chivying tones - which brings us back to reality TV, maybe. Certainly the adversarial quality promised by the "Showdown" page isn't borne out by the discourse it has so far generated. Given the singlemindedness with which the gallery itself has ruthless exalted success as the only vindication in art worth having, the whole thing is unexpectedly cuddly.
So the internet may be a good place to talk about art, one's own or someone else's. Whether that means it's a good place to make or look at art isn't quite so clear, though, like a good travel brochure, it may make you want to go out and see the real thing. I rather prefer the cheerfully childish illustration site worth100.com, where illustrators use digital software to doctor well-known pictures: Godzilla cresting Hokusai's wave, a 19th-century nude dressed with bikini-shaped tan marks, Caravaggio's Christ holding a Colt 45, and so on. The skills on show are precisely tailored to the medium in which they're seen, and they, as well as whatever wit or subversion the artist exhibits, can be the subject of praise or criticism. It doesn't set out to be art with a capital "A", and indeed that particular bundle of pretensions is something it cheerfully mocks. Perhaps it's best to accept that the online realm is an intrinsically taste-free zone: to learn to stop worrying, and love the pixel.
