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Net Gains (Jan 31, 96)
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One of the simple pleasures that my girl and I occasionally indulge in is roaming around with no particular aim in mind. On one of our jaunts, we ended up in the Jehangir Art Gallery. To put it in a nutshell, we had a great time there ! These pleasant memories came rushing back to me the other day - while I was surfing the Net. I made a stop at The Gallery for Digital Arts. The home page was started off in the hope that one day computer graphics would be considered fine art by the art community.
This is a very unique gallery to make a stop at. One look at it, and you never would have noticed that they aren't hand painted. Images of Scarabs, and Fractal Fish loom large at this site. There are plenty of fascinating "paintings" to be appreciated there.
Through Lover's Eyes is an online theme art exhibition at http://137.143.111.3/art/strausl/homepag.html. This is an exhibition by Linda Strauss who is an art instructor at a college abroad. Her home page talks about her looking at the good things in life, and presenting them for the world to see likewise. Online art exhibitions are very much like the ones we have in our brick-and-mortar galleries - you can spend hours moving slowly from one painting to another, looking at this one in more detail, avoiding that one. The only thing that may take away some of the pleasure is the resolution of your computer monitor - how clear a picture you can enjoy all depends on that.
The fascinating thing about having painting or a series of them on the Net is the reach you have. You may not have the resources nor the money to travel around the world, or your country for that matter, to exhibit your works of art. But if you put your stuff on the Internet, you are not bound by the time of day, or limits of boundaries.. In Cyberspace, anyone with access can see the results of your efforts anytime - like a day & night global art gallery ! As of now, it would be accessible to roughly 5 million computers worldwide. Any of these 5 million computer users can drop in at your gallery at leisure, as per their schedule. Though there are complaints that putting art on the Net amounts to cheapening it, and viewing art on a computer monitor makes even a MonaLisa look almost the same as a work by a fresher, the benefits outweigh the cribbing, which explain the hajaar art galleries on the Net.
The communications giant AT&T have a whole lot of sites about India. One of these sites is their Virtual Art Gallery - a site that features some of India's "celebrated contemporary artists". I'm not too much into the art scene, so I couldn't verify whether Reuben Sinha, Bhagwan Kapoor, Ganesh Haloi, and Sanjay Bhattacharjee did come under that catagory. But most of their paintings did look like modern art - stuff that goes over your head, but still gets the "Ooh dahling, it's beautiful !" response, from socailites !
If you've got into the mood of enjoying Indian art on the Net, you could make a stop-over at another one - the IndiaWorld Art Gallery . The IndiaWorld Art Gallery is an endeavour to bring the world closer to the "Indian way of life" (the culture, the society etc..) Featured here, are works by Laxman Shreshtha, RK Laxman, Rekha Rao, & M F Hussain ( none of the MADhuri series though !). The speciality of this site is the fact that you can not only browse through the works of art on display, but if you're interested (and have a lot of money to spend), you can even buy some of it off the Net !! Right now, for instance, you could buy M.F. Hussain's Serigraph Ganesha at US$ 675.00 ( inclusive of insurance & freight). An electronic order form makes your work easier if you're using a credit card. Delivery is done within 4 - 6 weeks.
On a more active note, you could visit IndiaWorld's World Cup Cricket 1996 Home page. It aims at giving updates during the World Cup besides a huge vault of records and statistics on the previous world cups and the participating teams. During the matches, you can get half-hourly updates of the matches in progress, and comments a la Gavaskar. For now though, you could check out the groupings, the schedules, and the World Cup archives !
Log in ... and be bowled over !!