In a recent article entitled <a href="/cgi/to.cgi?t=1040">browser.art</a>,
Alex Galloway wrote:

"Browser.art is not simply the acceptance of a tech *aesthetic* (like an
ASCII picture would be), but a focus on technology itself as an object. It's
not quicktime (video, but redirected to the web) and it's not realaudio
(sound, but redirected to the web). In this mini-genre of net.art, the web
itself is the object."

To which Amardeep Singh replied:

More and more, the gesture you're making reminds me of an "academic"
debate in art-history that was going on, largely in the pages of
_Artforum_ (then the center of the "serious" New York art world), in the
late 1960's. Traditionally, it's thought of as a debate between people like
Michael Fried, who, following Clement Greenberg, wanted to continue to
organize art-criticism around aesthetic value in painting. On the other side
were artists (who liberally theorized their own, "minimalist" works) like
Robert Morris and Donald Judd, who were interested in what Judd called the
"specific object." For Judd at least the specific object was about getting
away from the boundedness of two-dimensional painting (painting in those
days had no content) and injecting art into *space* (Judd: "Actual space is
intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface").
Judd and Morris were interested in exploring the parameters of the object
itself.

If you transpose the terms of this debate, you, I think, would be on the
Judd/Morris side: "the web itself is the object" as a version of "objecthood
itself is the art." The trick would be to recast the debate in terms of the
determinations of technology. That's obvious in net.art, but the fact of
minimalism's relationship to technology (specifically, industrial tech) was
rarely mentioned in the 1960's debates. This might also have bearing on how
transhistorically you want to apply "interface," which is a
technologically-specific term.

The debate, which is in some ways between traditionalists (who had vested
interests in a certain reified vision of the modern, in cubism) and
modernists (i.e., minimalists), also had other components. Mainly these were
the new art-forms that were emerging: conceptual art (Sol LeWitt), pop art,
op art. The new art-forms quickly established themselves and in many ways
superseded the debate, but there are lots of ways in which the new stuff
also depended on the debate for their existence. The added difficulty is
that minimalism continued to impose its big black boxes and steel girders on
the art-world for a long time after this debate dried up and Artforum began
to become the boutique magazine (sort of a more pretentious "Harper's
Bazaar") it is today.

It didn't become clear until the early 1980's with artists like Cindy
Sherman and Barbara Kruger, and with the publication of Hal Foster's "The
Anti-Aesthetic," that conceptual art (and everything spinning off from it:
the postmodern) had become the dominant. The late 1960's was a strange
little moment just before the full flowering of postmodern art. And 1998 is
the strange little moment before the full flowering of …? When will it be
possible to wade through all of the pontificating and buzzword-generating
("the age of …" "the decade of …" "generation…"), and actually see
what it was that we were in?

Cindy Bernard replied:

When Galloway writes "But it is here that web producers are thinking within
the confines of the web, rather than simply repurposing offline material"
isn't he proposing a rather vague and generalized definition of site
specificity?

I agree with Singh–I don't believe that it is useful to locate the web as
an object as Galloway does in order to attempt to theorize what a useful web
based art practice might be. This (as Singh correctly points out) puts us
back in the late 1960's. The works Galloway mentions are similar to early
site specific works and in fact are well defined by the later half of the
Serra quote: "The works become part of the site and restructure both
conceptually and perceptually the organization of the site."

c&c continued the thread:

"In the Sea of Tranquility, the American astronauts' 'fixed point' is merely
a touchdown site within the time of the trip from the earth to the
moon…less to do with position…than with situation."–Paul Virilio

I have been considering the word "site" with regard to internet art. The
online work of a few artists seems to transgress both the notions of "web as
object" and site specificity of audio and video "redirected to the web."
Culling information from telematic cultures and/or what I might deem
constructing "telematic re-mixes," the convoluted nature of these sites and
their states of continous update seem to skate transgressive status.