I'm glad to hear the contested issues of media preservation getting some
play on Rhizome (see Marisa S. Olson's and Philip Galanter's <a href="/archive/digest/msg00017.rhiz">comments</a>
in the 4.13.01 Rhizome Digest). I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see
some confusion about the variable media paradigm I've proposed, since
it's a radical break with some time-honored assumptions about art and
media.

We are so caught up in a view of art segregated by medium that even
attempting a medium-independent vocabulary can be confusing, as when
Marisa's report on the Preserving the Immaterial conference defined the
terms +reproduction+ and +duplication+ in the exact opposite sense as to
how they were presented (I use the former to mean lossy copies and the
latter to mean lossless). A different choice of terms, such as
"reproducible" v. "replaceable" media, might clear up this
misunderstanding–but beyond mere semantic confusion lie some deeper
misunderstandings that strike at the heart of what it means to make and
preserve art.

Marisa noted astutely that curators of obsolete artworks, be they candy
spills or video installations, would have to exercise interpretation to
re-create them in future contexts. Marisa concluded, however, that such
reinterpretation meant that an artist's intentions would expire along
with the ephemeral media she originally worked in. But "original"
artistic intent, in the narrow sense Marisa seems to define it, expires
the moment an artist hangs a painting in a gallery or uploads HTML to a
public url. Any artist who's responsible tries to direct a viewer's
experience, but any artist who's realistic knows you can't keep people
from misreading the work in some way. (T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom go
so far as to claim that such misreading has been the primary engine
behind the history of art as we know it.) Artistic intent is a construct
inferred by a viewer.

Some constructs, however, are more informed than others. When artists
fill out a variable media questionnaire, such as the one featured on
Rhizome's ArtBase, it is true that they may choose to grant the
collecting institution an unprecedented kind of authority. But +not+
filling one out endows the institution with a far greater authority,
because then there's no document future critics can dig out to decide
whether a given interpretation is good or bad. And make no mistake about
it, museums will reinterpret works of art–sometimes consciously,
sometimes not, but usually to the detriment of all but the most
conservative elements of an artwork. A paint chip left in a file at the
Guggenheim almost became the Definitive Gray for all future fabrications
of Robert Morris's minimalist sculpture; fortunately, the artist had
articulated importance of the variability of his work in writings
against the fetishization of the "well-built object," so I was able to
nip this ossification in the bud. There are numerous other examples of
museums keeping Saint Francis's knuckle in a gilt reliquary no matter
how much this act contradicts the spirit of the man's life and work.
(The tragedy of Conceptual art is less that its artists found a market
for their work so much as the way that market stripped away what was
radically variable about the work, ossifying performances into props and
earthworks into photocollages.) And of course if an artist working in
ephemeral media doesn't want their work to vary at all, the variable
media paradigm is the only current proposal to allow enforcement of such
an expiration date.

Philip seemed concerned that the variable media model simply guaranteed
a "profit returning investment" for museums that lay out money for
candy, twigs, and Web sites. Well, since museums don't as a rule sell
works in their collection, the profits museums reap by collecting
variable media works are even more intangible than the works themselves.
To be sure, some curators may see an online artwork as a "cheap date"
compared to a six-figure video installation. However, collecting a Web
site via the variable media paradigm doesn't save a museum any money. On
the contrary, it ends up costing the institution buckets of money in the
longer term, when the HTML and Java will have to be re-written in new
formats to make the project viewable by future Internet standards. Hence
my argument for institutions to create variable media endowments to fund
such reinterpretations.

There is no rigorous way to define a market value for a work of online
art–which I think is all to the good. The dot-commification of the
Internet notwithstanding, online art still operates outside of the
exchange economy. (The check a museum writes for a commission, digital
or otherwise, only covers an honorarium and production costs, and thus
does not provide a standard for the artwork's market value.) The only
way I can imagine assigning a dollar amount to the value of a Web
project would be to add up all the money a collecting institution might
spend in future decades to safeguard an endangered work by translating
it from one platform to another. That figure would indicate the minimum
value that the work had for that institution. That value is a much more
meaningful number than some putative market value of the work, just as
the thousands of dollars a cat owner spends on vet bills is a better
indicator of the cat's value to her than the cat's $10 purchase price.

No collecting institution will ever be entirely insulated from market
pressures, so artists are right to be skeptical of museum's interests–
to a point. I believe that a museum that is committed to collecting
ephemeral works according to a variable media paradigm represents the
best strategy for preserving art the way artists meant it to be seen. By
disentangling artistic value from exchange value, the variable media
paradigm helps museums do what they're supposed to do: keep art alive.