This is a tale about what it means to be a museum in the age of cyberspace. The Tigertail Virtual Museum is a Web site containing 5,000 famous works of art that Robert Uzgalis, the museum's director, has "virtually restored." The works now look as he imagines they did at the time of their creation. Using software to alter images he has pulled from the Internet, Uzgalis intensifies colors on faded paintings and replaces body parts on chipped statues. He has even straightened the Leaning Tower of Pisa. "Some of the restorations are outrageous," he admitted.
But just because Uzgalis, a retired computer-science professor at UCLA, calls his Web site a museum does not mean it is one, at least not according to the broad official definition of the International Council of Museums. This could be a problem if Uzgalis decides to acquire another online address, one with the word "museum" as its suffix. Since 1998 anyone looking for Tigertail could find it at tigtail.org. The .org suffix indicated the nonprofit status of his arts-education organization.
On June 30, though, the world's cultural institutions were allowed to start submitting requests for Web addresses using the soon-to-be-available .museum suffix. Uzgalis must consider whether to apply for tigertail.museum, if only to prevent another site from snaring it.
But even if he does apply, the request could be denied if his site does not fit the council's definition of a museum, which includes prerequisites like being a permanent institution in the service of society and acquiring and conserving evidence of people and their environment.
The issues have been unleashed by plans to reserve a corner of cyberspace exclusively for those who meet the council's definition of a museum. Sites that apply for the privilege and are granted entry into the club will be identifiable by the .museum appended to their Web addresses.
Of course anyone who wants to call a site a museum or plop the word in the middle of a Web address may still do so. But only those with a .museum at the end will have received a sort of Good Webkeeping Seal of Approval, one that most traditional museums will probably be eager to display.
This is a much-need development, said Cary Karp, president of the Museum Domain Management Association, a nonprofit organization set up by the museum council and the J. Paul Getty Trust to administer the allocation of the .museum suffix.
As it stands, an Internet site that designates itself as a museum could as easily be a dealer in illegal cultural artifacts or a passionate hobbyist as a venerable institution. Online visitors, Karp said, "cannot recognize a scurrilous impostor as opposed to a bona fide museum. What .museum does is provide a seal of validation." That stamp will be bestowed by MuseDoma (as the association is called), using the council definition as a guide.
But the advent of .museum imposes a class system on what has been a successful Web democracy, said Jon Ippolito, a digital artist and new media curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, who cautiously noted that he was not speaking for his institution.
Ippolito argues that the wide-open nature of the Internet accounts for its vitality. In the Web's early days innovative artists and curators established cultural spaces online, not the traditional museums that in most cases are still playing catch-up.
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