Almost every museum in existence from the smallest, most remote institution to the largest, most central one is represented on the Internet, where a site like the Web Musuem network can deliver over 10 million documents from around the world and has 200,000 visitors a week. The ease with which this vast storehouse can be tapped puts into question the museum's structure: by offering a vast numberof options for viewers to choose from, the computer challenges the musuem's authority in determining relative merit and in shaping art history. Users of a museum's web site are free to draw their own conclusions rather than that of the curator. Moreover, this electronic technology allows an uniquely individual experience, a private one-on-one relationship between the viewer and the viewed. With a single click, viewers can pop in and out of various sites creating their own museums.

CD-Roms, some of which are interactive, show the world's great art collections in high quality reproductions. A Virtual-Reality Modelling Language environment with goggles and gloves allows users to navigate through a three-dimensional gallery, as for example the Louvre's stroll through rooms of French painting.

Besides its reproductive capacity, the Internet can also convey original art with computer artists transmitting their work in the medium in which it was created. The result is not a replication but a work as authenticas paint on canvas. When offered the means to enter Web art through hypertext, viewers can alter the work, thus greatly expanding Duchamp's notion of art needing a viewer to complete it.

But does all this mean that art can now penetrate the lives of people around the world without the intermediary of museums and galleries? In mirroring the entire information world, does the Internet free the museums from being truly encyclopedic? Does this mean that museums no longer need to be all encompassing and that they need not have to expand physically? Can the overwhelming experience of art be had with reproductions or with virtual reality? Will original art objects get upstaged by images of them made possible by electronic technology?

Bill Gates, the man whose company Microsoft is significantly contributing to the Internet's evolution, has a home in which electronic reproductions of famous paintings can be called up on large computer screens embedded in the walls or on flat screen propped on painter's easels.This is what he says, "I'll be the first home user of one of the most unusual electronic features in my house. In the course of my business travels, I have been able to spend time in museums looking at great art and there is nothing like seeing the real work. If multimedia reproduction and presentations make art more accessible and approachable, people who see the reproductions will want to see the originals. Exposure to the reproductions is likely to increase rather than diminish reverence for the real art and encourage more people to get out to museums and galleries."

In a world that is increasingly becoming virtual, for me the musuem is an important refuge of reality. Walking through any museum on a monitor can not capture the sensations and sights that are part of a visit. I believe that the experience of seeing original art in unique spaces designed in museums cannot be duplicated. Or as my friend David Rass, Director the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art says, "You don't eat the menu instead of thefood."