Many people are saying: "net art—what is it?"

Our Net Art Anthology program defines the frame thusly:

Net Art Anthology aims to represent net art as an expansive, hybrid set of artistic practices that overlap with many media and disciplines. To accommodate this diversity of practice, Rhizome has defined "net art" as "art that acts on the network, or is acted on by it."

Rhizome prefers the term "net art" because it has been used more widely by artists than "internet art," which is more commonly used by institutions, or "net.art," which usually evokes a specific mid-90s movement. The informality of the term "net art" is also appropriate not only to the critical use of the web as an artistic medium, but also informal practices such as selfies and Twitter poems.

For more reasoning from Artistic Director Michael Connor on "art that acts on the network, or is acted on by it," see this post from 2015.