I find it a little pathetic that, in light of recent furor around Martha Lame-Duck and the IPO of her irritating and not even that good losemoney.com (thank you Private Eye for putting the whole Internet
millionaires thing in perspective), somebody hasn't snapped up the domain name easymonet.com on which to flog reproductions of famous art pieces. It's not like there aren't already loads of sites doing just that,
but thankfully some online art sites are going much further and using the actual medium itself to create new forms of art or offer new ways of looking at traditional art. One of the very best of these has to be
www.artandculture.com which attempts to put the appreciation of art into a wider context with the use of features like "keywords" that use the associative qualities of the Internet to create new forms of art,
experience and understanding.
Marc Lafia, the site's editorial and creative director, describes these as "representing basic categories of thought, emotion or value. You follow them to look for new disciplines that share qualities with those you
already like, or to open up new worlds of arts and culture." So clicking on Jake and Dinos Chapman will give you good biographical information, recommended links and artists and keywords like "cartoonish", "in your
face" and "mathematical." Clicking on one of these will take you to all manner of unexpected places and people, including on the mathematical path, Fritz Lang. The huge range of contemporary artists means you
could spend weeks exploring the pathways associated with them, and get an awful lot of pleasure and understanding from doing so. As you can probably tell, I loved it; it's something only the Web can do, and
it's a million miles away from e-commerce sites. The site also offers good books, recommendations and the best worldwide arts calendar I've found.
Click here for the official TimeOut.com website >