Mr. Anderson spoke recently with Matthew Mirapaul, "arts@large" columnist for "The New York Times on the Web", about Internet-based creative works and the challenges their ever-evolving content, wide accessibility and infinite reproducibility present to the art world's traditional economic model. As an alternative, some are proposing a "pay per view" scenario, in which electronic payments of "micro-cash" would be made to the artist whenever a viewer accesses a work.

Maxwell L. Anderson: While there are many ways to think about the future of technology and the ways in which artists will adapt to its functional possibilities, I'm of the opinion that, at the end of the day, it's going to be hard to justify an economic model that doesn't involve artists and collectors. And thinking that collectors can be made into anonymous micro-cash-paying people who want access to art is probably not a feasible approach today. Maybe it will be down the road, when people become accustomed to micro-payments and to thinking about the whole range of content that they can get electronically.

I don't have a solution. I'm just probing some of the realities of the art world today, and how the migration into the new art world involves more and more Web-based production. And many artists are going to be pushing boundaries of different sorts, so I don't want to be limited by the phrase "Web based." And if that's the case, a person who might want to experience a digital work of art is probably going to want to be able to do more than just to pay for it and say it's on my hard drive whenever you want to look at it.

It's been marvelous to see artists beginning to figure out the implications of a post-market distribution model, but it has to be sustainable. That means you have to find a way to make it of importance to people with means who can collect it.

One model would be licensing samplings of works in several central environments where artists collaborate and provide distilled versions of the experience that they've created. Then the individual collector or museum or visitor can step up to the plate and put some resources down for the full experience.

Matthew Mirapaul: Is your reluctance to advocate a pay-per-view model due to a lack of technical feasibility?

Anderson: It is technically feasible in the sense that incremental micro-payments are now being undertaken in some commercial circumstances. It's very easy to have an e-commerce solution that debits your account after you download a digital asset. That's not the issue.

The issue is, is there a market? And if there is, should the Web model be the one that endures? Because the other point I would make is, the value of a work of art is commensurate with the breadth of its distribution in the traditional economic sense.

So, if a work of art is freely available to all, anywhere, 24 hours a day, some would say that its value as a consumable by a collector is minimal. If it's a limited edition -- if the collector has to download something, pay something and understands that there are only a set of a thousand object-oriented database experiences, after which there are no more to be sold or licensed -- then a value can be assigned in the traditional art market. And that flies in the face of what Web artists are hoping would be the case.

Just because it can be done technologically doesn't mean it's sustainable financially. That's the tricky part in printmaking or any other form of multiples: if a reproduced image is not quantified, then it loses its potential value.

Mirapaul: Is there an assumption here that digital artists want viewers to have full accessibility to their work all the time? Wouldn't some of them be happy to be paid by a collector and have it locked away on hard drive?

Anderson: Oh, absolutely, I think SOME would like that. But the discussions we've been having online thus far would suggest that some artists and others in the art world are pushing back at the notion that there might be a need to set some limits.

I don't have a point of view other than trying to figure out how to make this work in conjunction with the world we currently live in. That doesn't mean it's an ideal world; an ideal world would be one in which an artist makes works without concern for the market. This particular issue of distribution is magnifying to an extreme the difficulties of sustainability of an artist working in a new medium.

Mirapaul: How important should museums be to establishing the market for this kind of art? Should contemporary art museums be commissioning art-on-the-network projects?

Anderson: That's an interesting challenge. At the Whitney, we're particularly interested in finding solutions that work for artists because we've always been a kind of institutional advocate of artists and their needs, rather than a place which is seeking to collect their work in a way that is ONLY to our benefit. We want to be flexible and think about alternate strategies for artists to make their work seen and experienced.

That may well mean a shake-up in how museums are identified with the distribution of works of art. It may mean that museums in the digital environment are more peripheral than they've been before because the artists will have in their hands a processor and a browser, and they no longer need us. Then the role that museums perform is as an adjudicator, as a place that chooses which works it would single out for viewing and experiencing. But that doesn't end up connecting with ownership, so it becomes more of an exhibition model than a collecting model.

Mirapaul: Which takes us back to a pay-per-view model.

Anderson: Or a model of a subscription-based experience, which ultimately I prefer. I prefer the concept of a year-long subscription to some experience filter, in which the judgments are made by curators about which works are worth experiencing.

Let's build this out. You have several hundred affluent collectors worldwide who are prepared to step in and say, "I'd like to have a 6-by-6-foot flat screen in my living room," where the choices [of displayed works] that were made by the Whitney and other museums are navigable and, at a moment's notice, can be brought up on the screen -- or, in a free-space projection model, in my dining room during the main course.

That's a filtration issue because the problem with the Web is that it's like the Yellow Pages with no glue binding it, so anyone who identifies themselves as an artist and can put something up will be doing so. Then the filtration issue comes in as the key issue. The Web is a live 24-hour microphone on every conversation in this world, and unless you have filtration and adjudication of importance and quality, then the desired end-user ö a person of discernment who is curious about the art world -- will just give up.

The model for me would not be how museums can figure out how to collect this material. If the artists want us to go in this direction, the Whitney will happily follow and we will just figure out a way to be advocates of a museum that requires a rethinking of the traditional gallery-based model.

This is the first time in the history of art in which there has been a complete abdication of the system that has endured, basically unmolested, since the beginning of the Bronze Age. In it, a person desired something, another person was the facilitator of that, and the artist was on the other end of the spectrum. Now we're taking out the concept of the facilitating individual, whether it's a gallery or a Pope or any other form of mitigating presence in the distribution of a creative impulse to an observer.

So it's untested, and that's why everybody is struggling with this. And it's fascinating. But I don't fear for museums. I don't think museums will have any less of a role in being a filter or an adjudicator to what's important in art-making. I'd be more concerned if I owned a gallery.