The Art World and the World Wide Web

yes, we want our website to be honest. This desire for honesty,
for example, was behind our approach to the artist page.
I was going to mention the artist page. It’s quite distinctive. For
example, for every artist, you have a big author photograph.
The artist page is really important to our overall approach to the
site. We want the site to function as part of the network of our
artists, and in some way our context. After all, we have artists
who live all over the world. It’s very hard to create a community
when they are all so far apart. We have artists in Germany,
China, Korea, Brazil, a couple in Japan, a few in England, a
few in New York, a few throughout the United States. It’s just
hard to keep it all together as a family this way! The website is
a really good way of establishing a real context and community.
Can you give me more of a sense of how you see this happening?
Number one, we made a decision that we were going to keep
our website really up to date. We have someone who works
on it almost full-time. So we are always in communication
with the artists, finding out what they’re thinking, what they’re
up to, et cetera. We also decided really early on to use photographs
of the artists. I have to say, it was my idea. It’s an
attempt to try to establish and maintain a kind of intimacy
with the artists—and between the artists. We regularly change
the pictures, at least once a year, or something like that. It sets
the tone we want: high-tech intimacy. I’m just looking at the
site now, and I see Tony Oursler has a new portrait up—I
haven’t seen it before. He probably contacted us and wanted us
to change his picture. He’s done that several times. On the
other hand, we haven’t changed Ross Bleckner’s picture since
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