In the first of a new series of weekly blogs, Ana Finel Honigman is going to be picking the best art on the net.

Looking at porn online is probably a more productive use of time than watching the vast majority of what's posted on YouTube. While it's fun to coo at cute polar bear cubs or watch some kid ramble into her webcam, anyone wanting something more substantial should visit Ubuweb instead.

An independent, completely free archive that operates without official funding, is a peerless source of brilliant artistic materials, ranging from previously impossible-to-locate clips such as a1973 interview of Jacques Lacan by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller on French television, to Richard Kern's grainy, dark, pornographic art/punk films from the 1980s.

Other booty includes: Maya Deren's complete oeuvre, a montage of Banksy doctoring Paris Hilton CDs for last year's guerrilla art stunt, interviews with Allen Ginsberg, poetry readings by Bukowski and a selection of rare art films and performance videos by artists from Carolee Schneeman and Tracey Emin to Samuel Beckett and Chris Burden.

If that's not enough, there's video of Billie Whitelaw doing Beckett, excerpts from Peter Greenaway's series of documentaries on modern US composers and Orson Welles' delightfully wacky The One-Man Band, a fascinating, dark, glimpse into the film-maker's final years.

UbuWeb's content is refreshingly unique and challenging - and so is its approach to copyright. It irreverently disregards intellectual property concerns as its mission statement shows - "[we are an] unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill," "post[ing] much of [our] content without permission; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them." And fast means that the site is updated monthly.

Ubuweb can exist because technical support and maintenance costs are covered by like-minded organisations such as WFMU, a New York-based "free-form" FM radio station; Artmob, an online archive of publicly licensed Canadian art designed to challenge Canadian intellectual property policy, and The Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University.

Though the art on offer is diverse and widely experimental, the site's own design is wisely elegant and restrained. At last: something on the web that doesn't echo David Frost's definition of TV as "an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home."