ART : It’s a Museum. Well, Virtually : Can the old masters make it in the brave new world? They do on the World Wide Web.

Add the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the list of cyberart galleries.

Joining a growing number of museums providing on-line access to everything from the ancient Egyptian artifacts of Tutankhamen to the Pop Art soup cans of Andy Warhol, LACMA recently unveiled its own on-ramp to the information superhighway by becoming one of the largest American art museums to take up residence on the Internet’s World Wide Web.

“Publishing on the World Wide Web is an important first step in making LACMA an on-line destination,” says Stephanie Barron, LACMA’s coordinator of curatorial affairs. “It helps us fulfill our role as a major cultural resource by providing public access for learning about art.”

The outlet for these virtual resources--the Web--is a revolutionary part of the Internet where graphics, text, sound and video, residing in computers all over the world are seamlessly linked, which means cybersurfers can easily move from one site, and one bit of information, to another.

With access to a computer, modem and a “graphical Internet browser,” such as the program called Mosaic, art lovers can now look up dates and descriptions of exhibitions, as well as general LACMA information. And for those who just like the pictures, a growing catalogue of full-color digital reproductions of works from LACMA’s permanent collection is available on line as well.

For the traditional museum-goer, the service, called LACMAweb, might at first sound like little more than a standard guidebook. In fact, a large part of its initial content was taken from one of the museum’s books on its in-house masterpieces, as well as its published calendars and other informational materials. But LACMAweb offers something a printed calendar or a guidebook can’t: immediate and almost infinite flexibility. “With a book, when it’s done, it’s done,” says LACMA systems manager Eric Lindeen. “But going on-line enables you to continually add more information and modify it to suit the interests of your users.”

And LACMAweb has other advantages as well. It could become a kind of adjunct gallery for the museum, showcasing exhibitions that can be specially designed to exploit the Web’s multimedia possibilities. Even now, it offers users direct access not just to LACMA but to 14 other on-line museums as well.

The ability to create a virtual art museum was little more than a pipe dream before the innovations of the Web and the development of graphical browser programs. Until only a few years ago, the Internet was mostly a text-only repository, and navigating it required the techno-savvy of a true computer nerd. Today, the easy-access, multimedia Web is by far the fastest growing part of the Internet; more than 35,000 private, commercial and educational users had established Web sites by the end of 1994.

“The real value of the Web is how easy it is to use,” says Lindeen. “Because there’s no technical barrier any longer, we’re no longer limiting our options for those people who don’t understand that side of it.”

This user-friendliness is apparent on your first visit to LACMA’s “home page,” where you’re greeted with an invitation to “enjoy your visit to our virtual museum,” along with a color image of the building and a menu of what’s “inside.”

Click on “Exhibition Schedule” and you find that you still have plenty of time to catch, for example, “Italian Panel Painting of the Early Renaissance,” which runs until March 12. Click again and you’ll see a summary of the show, which covers works “conceived in the most important centers of the Italian Renaissance, including Siena, Florence and Venice,” as well as a profile of curator Susan Caroselli. Hit the “Back” box and you return to the main menu, where “Education,” “Membership” and “Museum Shop” link you to more LACMA information. “Art Museums” opens the door to more on-line art institutions, and “Permanent Collection” takes you into the heart of LACMAweb: the pictures.

As of now, there are approximately 100 artworks “hung” on the Web. While hardly a substitute for the original works, the cyberart nonetheless offers a surprisingly detailed look at some of museum’s most prized pieces, including Winslow Homer’s “The Cotton Pickers,” and “The Hope Athena,” a marble Islamic sculpture dating to the 2nd Century. Each piece is accompanied by notes that explain the background of the piece and the artist. F or the home computer user, the service may seem slow at first, with some images taking a few minutes to download. In fact, one of the lingering problems with the Web remains its slow performance during high usership periods, a problem that could grow worse as Microsoft introduces its own Internet connection in its Windows 95 software, and as additional links proliferate.

But for those (like myself) fortunate to dial in through faster university or business connections, the speed and ease of navigating the Web is what makes the thing so irresistible.

For wired art lovers, the Web can extend to much more than just LACMA’s exhibitions. The virtual version of the new Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh includes a gallery-by-gallery tour, as well as such Warhol icons as his depictions of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy. The Smithsonian is online, so is the Whitney in New York and the Dallas Museum of Art. According to LACMA’s Lindeen, the next big American museum due to come on line is the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

And of course it’s just as easy to get to travel around the world via computer as it is to get to mid-Wilshire. Cybersurfers can sample the National Gallery of Australia or check out WebLouvre’s Monet, Degas or Renoir. The latter service also has an audio component, which lets you listen to a snippet from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, among other choices.

Just make sure you don’t confuse WebLouvre with the real Museee du Louvre. Warns WebLouvre’s curator: “Their cultural service has threatened to get their lawyer to annoy my headmaster, even if the paintings are in the public domain.”

Such digs serve as a not-so-subtle reminder of copyright concerns that bedevil the Web, where almost anything can be copied, and often is. Richard Thompson, a Los Angeles entertainment and multimedia attorney, says that Web operators should enjoy the same copyright protection of other media, citing a case in which an Internet bulletin board operator was held liable for a subscriber’s unauthorized use of Playboy magazine images downloaded from the service.

“What exactly the boundaries of fair use (of digital images) are is ill-defined, and are intentionally so,” says Thompson, who notes that some on-line museums are uploading only low-resolution images to discourage bootleggers. “But I’ve never heard of a situation when anyone was held accountable for downloading information for their own use.”

At LACMA, curators are aware of the potential Web copyright problems, but, according to Lindeen, making the artworks accessible is worth the risk.

“Our most valued experience is obviously when people come to see the work up close,” he says. “But there’s still a lot that can be learned from art without actually being here. Our ultimate goal is to provide people with an educational experience at whatever level we can reach them.”

* The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s address on the World Wide Web is https://www.lacma.org/.