Does anyone remember those early prototypes of "Virtual Museums"? You
could traverse these three-dimensional rooms filled with "paintings" on
the walls – like a Museum of Modern Art on your desktop. This, we were
told, would be the future of interactive exhibitions. Since then we've
seen an explosion of artworks which are inappropriate, and often
impossible, to hang on physical or even virtual walls. Most Net art
renders virtual corridors virtually useless.

So why is the Guggenheim building a "Virtual Museum," designed by the
architectural firm Asymptote? Sketches of the three-dimensional
"building" sure look cool, but it all seems so 20th Century.

Compare this with the Art Entertainment Network
(http://aen.walkerart.org), an on-line exhibition from the Walker Art
Center's Gallery 9. Curated by Steve Dietz, AEN is not so much a
utopian vision of the future, but a vision of the present: borrowing
ideas and designs from commercial Web sites.

AEN is the on-line component of Let's Entertain, an exhibition on view
at the Walker. According to the catalog, Let's Entertain examines the
"pleasure zones of today's entertainment-driven consumer society." The
artworks look at the advent of gaming and sports culture, the branding
of products as well as bodies, themed entertainment design such as Nike
Town, and the boundaries between art and fashion.

Playing off these themes, Dietz's on-line exhibition models itself after
the darling of the Internet economy: the "portal." Just as everyone
from Yahoo to Microsoft tries to create the ultimate one-stop
destination for web surfers – a place with news headlines, shopping,
and stock quotes at your fingertips – Dietz creates a one-stop
destination for on-line art.

At first glance, the site has many of the elements of MSN.com – except
it's a whole lot prettier. Designed by Vivian Selbo, the top of the
site has ad banners, a search engine, gives you the current date and
time, even lets you customize the colors and choose a sound track. And
then, of course, there's a link to the on-line store: which has dozens
of "musthaves" available for download.

Also on the main page is a long list of artworks, arranged vertically as
bands of color. To view a work you simply click on the title – and
away you go. Several dozen artists are featured, such as C5, Mark
Napier, Mongrel, Natalie Bookchin, RTMark, and Ken Goldberg. One would
be hard pressed to find a better snapshot of the emerging Net art genre.

No doubt this is an elegant and attractive way to present an exhibition,
but what's so special? These first impressions are smartly deceptive;
the site's true brilliance emerges as soon as you make your first click.
Things are rarely what they seem.

The ad banners don't link to actual sponsors, but to art works – such
as Airworld, a site which mocks corporate Web site conventions. If you
try the search engine, you won't get an exhaustive list of results a la
Excite or Yahoo. Instead AEN will send your query to the search engine
of a single art site, such as Rhizome.org – which will scan its own
contents to match your request.

For a pleasant surprise, try to customize your own color. Choose blue
and the site might turn red. Try again, and you'll begin to understand
that the site has a life of its own.

Looking for a soothing soundtrack to accompany your web surfing?
Instead you'll find a cheesy synthesizer rendition of Purple Haze or,
better yet, clandestine audio recordings from the opening day of the
Getty Museum – humorous eavesdropping on patrons and security guards.

To fully appreciate the site's dynamism, hit the reload button on your
browser. The site reshuffles, with a new color, a new search engine, and
a new date format. More importantly, you'll also see a new list of art
works.

AEN wonderfully illustrates a point made by Rhizome's Alex Galloway, who
lectured last week at UC Berkeley. Galloway said the materials used to
make Internet art are the same materials used to talk about it.
Artists, critics, and curators are all using the same digital building
blocks – allowing a unique fusion of art and discourse.

Dietz's creation presents the artworks in a way which could only be done
on the Web: it's fluid, unpredictable, and fun. And it effortlessly
brings the works within in a critical context: elaborating on common
themes such as commodification and entertainment. Faced with the
unpredictable bells and whistles of AEN, one thinks of Yahoo and
Amazon's unfulfilled promises – of all these sites which try so hard to
please and deliver so little.

But AEN does deliver. In conceptual and aesthetic terms, the exhibition
borders on a work of art in its own right. After exploring AEN, one has
to wonder: Who needs virtual hallways? It's hard to imagine staging an
on-line exhibition in any other way.

Lets Entertain was organized by Philippe Vergne for the Walker Art
Center and was co-produced by the Centre Goerge Pompidou Museum of
Modern Art in Paris. The show is on view in Minneapolis through April
30, and will travel to Portland, Paris, Mexico City, and Miami through
2001.