Intel Investors - For those interested in Art, check out the following.
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nytimes.com
Intel Quietly Launches Online Art Venture
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
Intel Corp. has quietly launched ArtMuseum.net, an online art-exhibition venture that is designed to merge the company's marketing muscle and technical resources with the museum world's cultural riches and patina of prestige.
ArtMuseum.net The first exhibit at ArtMuseum.net is titled "Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam."
The first exhibit on the new Web site, which has been live since Feb. 28, is "Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam," an expanded version of the virtual tour developed by the National Gallery of Art for the show's run in the museum's real-world galleries in Washington, last fall.
Visitors to Intel's online exhibit can view digital reproductions of the show's 72 paintings, listen to audio-tour sound clips (but only after registering as "members") and buy Van Gogh-themed mugs, scarves and other memorabilia through a prominently linked online gift shop. The site also promises to add some advanced features soon.
ArtMuseum.net is to be formally unveiled on April 23 with the launch of a second online exhibit, "The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000," the Intel-sponsored retrospective scheduled to open on that date at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Intel is assisting in the development of the exhibition's ambitiously conceived virtual version, and people familiar with the project say it will reside exclusively on ArtMuseum.net rather than on the Whitney's own site.
Ciaran Doyle, director of Intel productions, said ArtMuseum.net "is intended to feature blockbuster art and make it available to the world at large" via the Internet. Future material on the site may include a gallery for digital- art projects and an area for art news.
Doyle explained that the venture is intended to be self-supporting through a combination of museum financing, corporate sponsorships and advertising revenue. Despite a note on the site that says only the first 10,000 visitors to register as members will be able to do so free (earning gift-shop discounts as well as access to audio clips), the company has abandoned plans to charge for access to selected parts of the site.
While the public may benefit from ArtMuseum.net, so will Intel. Historically, the company has encouraged the use of its highest-powered chips by supporting graphically intensive Web sites and software, and ArtMuseum.net already plays a starring role in at least one of the company's national television advertisements for its new Pentium III microprocessor.
By leveraging the museum world's cultural treasures and tutorial functions, the company can reach a demographically desirable audience with a subtle sales pitch, as well as strive to make inroads into the education market segment it at one time had conceded to Apple, which sells computers based on rival microprocessors. Dana E. Houghton, Intel's director of corporate affairs, said, "Do we have a business motive? Of course."
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In return, though, participating museums stand to be rewarded by sponsorship dollars, plus Intel's promotional prowess and technical expertise. For example, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which is listed as "contributing museum" on the Intel site, has just relaunched its own Web site and is vowing to broaden the site this summer with a three-dimensional virtual museum, a chat room and an online store -- features already on or promised to appear on ArtMuseum.net.
After viewing ArtMuseum.net, Jamie McKenzie, the editor of From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal in Bellingham, Wash., said he was impressed by the site but deeply concerned by its overlapping commercial, cultural and educational elements.
"This has ominous implications for the art world," McKenzie said. "It is one thing to see corporate philanthropy supporting the work of real museum professionals, quite another to see paintings appear with 'Intel Inside.'" (McKenzie was referring to Intel's sponsorship of the site, and the pages do not actually bear Intel promotional phrases.)
"When corporations conglomerate news, entertainment, textbook publishing and the art world," McKenzie continued, "we end up with a blurring of ethical and professional boundary lines. News becomes entertainment, and museums become theater. We must be alert to the Disney-fication of information and art."
According to the ArtMuseum.net site, Intel will soon add some theatrical high- tech features to the online Van Gogh exhibition. They will include virtual tours that allow visitors in remote locations to trade typed-text comments in real time while traversing the show's digital galleries and user-navigable three-dimensional renderings of a pair of the artist's most-famous paintings. A video clip that takes viewers inside "The Bedroom" is part of a Pentium III television ad and also can be downloaded from the site.
It is not known why the site was launched without these features being ready, but it is possible that all production efforts are being directed toward the launch of the "American Century" virtual exhibit, which people involved in the project say has been slowed by the recent curatorial changes at the Whitney.
When the first part of the "American Century" exhibit opens, though, its online incarnation has the potential to be an involving experience. About 100 of the 700 artworks in the first installment of the real-world show will be represented on the Web, with plans to supplement each piece with multimedia material where appropriate.
In addition to sound clips from the show's audio tour, stills from seven films will be linked to streaming-video excerpts from the selected movies and the page for "Tango," by the sculptor Elie Nadelman, will be accompanied by footage of Rudolph Valentino dancing in the 1922 film "Blood and Sand." The site is being assembled by the well-known graphic design firm Razorfish, which also is redesigning the Whitney's site.
Because the exhibit is meant to convey a sense of the American experience over the past century, visitors will be able to view the works by themes like industry and technology, politics and social change and nature. At some point, they will be able to follow curatorial guided tours or create their own sequenced visits and make them available to friends, an increasingly popular Web-museum feature. In June, officials also will begin testing handheld devices that might display material from the Web site for visitors in the Whitney's galleries, and the site will be further expanded when the show's second portion, covering the last 50 years, opens in September.
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