I may not know much about art, but I know what I like and that is viewing it, buying it and creating it.
Despite living in London, surrounded by art galleries, the choice of exhibitions and sales is incredibly limited given the enormousness of what exists in galleries from Tokyo to Los Angeles. And often gallery shops do not make exhibition favourites available as prints.
Most galleries have websites nowadays, even if they give scant information other than an address. The best sites, such as the Tate, let you browse through their collections online, but then we would expect nothing less from national galleries with generous sponsors.
When you look at the smaller venues, the Originals Gallery in Stow-on-Wold has gone one better than simply whacking up some JPEGS and text. To encourage punters to take a closer look at its paintings, the gallery has begun screening a series of web casts that follow a single artist creating work over a day or a weekend.
Owner Richard Thomas says 1,000 people flocked to the site to take part in the first webcast in May. Sadly, the increased traffic has still not convinced anyone to buy original work directly from the site, but Thomas expects that to change within two or three years. He has already sold 20 works that people viewed on the site and then visited in person.
The first artist to take part in the webcast project was painter Martin Hall, who has also tried selling direct from his site at www.martin-artist.com. He agrees that at the moment, the quality of the online image is not good enough to the sell the work of a relatively unknown artist, as most people would be unwilling to part with between £500 and £1,000 for a work they had not viewed in person.
If you are ready to make that online purchase now, however, Londonart has original works by 300 artists for sale and allows you to search by category (ie, abstract, landscape, photography), artist name, size and even price.
Axis claims to have the largest interactive database of contemporary British art on the internet, featuring 4,000 artists and 15,500 artworks. The database will search for anything from animation to glassware to watercolour, and much of the work is for sale.
The site also puts together online exhibitions in its cyber gallery, which unfortunately requires a cumbersome software download (unless you happen to have Blaxxun Contact preinstalled) and registration process. Once there, you can walk around the gallery scanning the works on offer, stopping to click on anything of particular interest.
If you do not feel confident enough to buy an original work online, you can opt to buy prints. London-based Easyart is a great place to start. It sells hundreds of reproductions and even lets you turn digital photos of your friends, family or self into Warhol-esque prints. An interactive framing facility - combined with a real-time pricing mechanism - lets you try out different frames online before making a decision.
For beyond-the-JPEG artistic surfing, there are sites that create work specifically for the online medium, and some of the best digital art lives at e-2. The site features Word Perhect, an internet project by former Turner prize nominee Tomoko Takahashi that examines the way word processing software has changed our language and our lives. The work is clever, interactive, and a far more fulfilling experience than pixelated Renoirs.
Another digital art destination is the Franklin Furnace, a New York city art institution that existed in the real world at 112 Franklin Street until 1998, when it ran out of funds to keep the building. Now it exists only in cyberspace.
Franklin Furnace focuses on performance art, so much of the work is archived as video. Given the quality of video on the internet, your enjoyment of the site will vary with the quality of your connection and your level of patience.
If all of that has inspired you to action, Art-heads is a new British initiative to get everyone involved in creating art by providing a collaboration space online. The first project will be a photography exhibition of kebab shops worldwide.
Elly Clarke put Art-heads together, and she wants to see, for example, someone taking a photograph of a kebab shop in New York, swapping it with an project participant in Berlin, and then displaying the German photo back in the American shop.
So go on, no art history degree necessary, just grab a keyboard and a camera and get involved.
