How do you collect an immaterial art form like Net.Art? The question
is all the more relevant since many first-generation Net artists
opposed the institutional framework of museums as well as the commercial
framework of the gallery system. Inspired by earlier avantgarde
movements, the first Net artists wanted to create art for the
Internet as the new public space. Continuing “the dematerialisation
of the art object” (Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s phrase
describing the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s), their works
did not manifest physically but existed solely in the network of digital
data in the form of webpages, Web browsers, and Web archives.
The TTTP Net.Art Collection—printouts of single webpages from
seminal Net.Art works, including TTTP’s first website, framed in
enameled frames—demonstrates the misguidedness of thinking that
Net.Art can be turned into collectible items. At the same time, the
collection pays homage to these works and their use of the Internet
as medium and material and recognizes that their art-historical
importance is comparable to that of classical painting.