Don’t Download the Revolution Yet

Promises, promises.

They come with every revolution, including technological ones. The digital revolution now in full swing has made lots of promises in the world of art, from Web-based artistic masterpieces that can be downloaded to your home PC to online auctions for those old-fashioned things called paintings and sculptures that can’t be passed directly through a telephone line.

A lot of the promises haven’t yet panned out. Take the inaugural San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Webby Prize last May. The names of the artists nominated for outstanding achievement in Web-based art are even harder to recall today than those for last year’s Oscars in best supporting categories.

Other high-flying schemes have already crashed and burned. It isn’t just Garden.com or EToys that floundered by selling seeds and skateboards on the Internet. Artnet, which launched an online auction site for blue-chip painting and sculpture less than two years ago, folded its cards earlier this month. The Web site will keep its online magazine, network of gallery representations and comprehensive auction-results database, but it plans to focus its own auctions on less expensive prints and photographs.

Maybe there’s a niche for Artnet somewhere between a bricks-and-mortar gallery and EBay. Whatever the case, stumbles and false starts like these won’t stop the digital revolution in its tracks. In at least two starkly different ways--one practical, the other cultural--its art impact is already profound.

Culturally, the digital revolution is changing the way we see. Digital imagery is very different from what we’ve been accustomed to for the last 500 years, when vision was acutely shaped by the expanding technology of optical lenses. The Renaissance invention of linear perspective and, a century later, the camera obscura got the ball rolling. Leon Battista Alberti and his Florentine pals, Filippo Brunelleschi and Donato Bramante, based their classical rules of perspective on the theory that light rays emanating from objects are received by the human eye at the apex of a visual pyramid. A picture plane is just a vertical section of this pyramid.

It didn’t take very long for artists to figure out that this theoretical “vertical section” could be made actual. In 1525, Albrecht Durer illustrated the use of a device for making portraits by drawing on a pane of glass held vertically, while looking through an eyepiece opposite the center of the pane. Twenty-eight years later, the first description of a camera obscura--literally, a “dark room”--appeared in print, explaining how light rays passing through a pinhole into a darkened space would cast an upside-down image on a surface opposite. In 1568, a professor at the University of Padua showed that substituting a ground-glass lens for the pinhole could produce a clearer, more brilliant image.

This optical revolution, if that’s what we can call it, formed a pedestal for artistic thought. Art had a moral mission, and part of that virtuous goal was the imitation of nature. In the Middle Ages, no artist had felt the need to copy nature, for the hierarchy of heaven and Earth was expressed in a different way. But in Leonardo’s “Notebooks,” the Renaissance artist explicitly cast himself as a natural philosopher. Likewise, dozens of lesser-known artist-theorists of the day took pains to explain that imitating nature was a way to worship God.

So, in the wake of the optical revolution, good art literally became inseparable from virtue. Works of art were praiseworthy for mirroring the moral order of God’s universe. These old habits die hard. Even a century of Modernism didn’t fully dislodge them. A lot of today’s fights about art--including fights between conservative politicians and liberal artists, as well as fights among artistic factions--revolve around this old-time faith in the virtuous requirements of art.

How will the digital revolution change the way we see? It’s too soon to tell, since the revolution is still young and will overlap with lens-based optics. But the displacement of lens-based imagery from its pedestal by an avalanche of pictures fabricated from a system of numbers expressed as electronic impulses will certainly bring changes.

“Superflat,” an exhibition of work by a generation of young Japanese artists opening today at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new outpost at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center, might be one visual clue. “Superflat,” as its name suggests, champions art that employs an emphatic two-dimensionality, which links the burgeoning digital sphere to traditions of non-Western art (see related story, Page 4). Just as the look of Renaissance perspective was not only different from what came before but embodied a new way of being in the world, so the look of digital art will create new configurations in our social universe.

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Now, what about the second, more practical level? There, the digital revolution is already making a blunt difference. The Internet is an unprecedented tool for open access to information, which can certainly be a powerful agent. Y2K may have opened without the technological meltdown that had been feared, and it sure closed with a tragicomic fiasco of dangling chads in Florida. But, halfway through, the Internet sent a bolt of lightning through the boardrooms of America’s art museums.

In Fort Worth, the great Kimbell Art Museum exploded into the news. The Kimbell is an extraordinary compendium of mostly Old Master paintings assembled over recent decades and housed in one of the nation’s most beautiful museum buildings. Kay Kimbell Fortson and Ben Fortson--a husband-and-wife team who are president and vice president of the Kimbell’s board, and whose three adult children are also voting members, giving the board a family majority--had switched from volunteer status to part-time salaried employees. Since January 1998, the couple received more than $2.5 million in compensation from the Kimbell Art Foundation’s tax-exempt coffers.

The news ignited a firestorm of outrage. Trustees elsewhere normally serve without compensation, as the Fortsons and other fellow board members had done throughout the Kimbell’s history. (The foundation’s charter dates to 1936, and it even flatly states, “No part of [the foundation’s] net earnings shall ever inure to the benefit of any private individual.”) The huge new salaries, which were applied retroactively, also appeared to violate the U.S. tax code. The IRS forbids self-dealing, a practice by which foundation trustees enrich themselves, their family or their friends from the trust’s bank account, over which they hold a fiduciary responsibility on behalf of the public. The Kimbell has $800 million in assets.

This story was remarkable for its deeply disturbing ethical dimension and for the gruesome precedent it might set for other nonprofit governance. What was also notable, however, was how it came to light. An enterprising reporter for the alternative Fort Worth Weekly newspaper, acting on a tip, scrutinized the Kimbell’s tax returns for 1998 and 1999. She didn’t get them from the Kimbell or from the office of Texas’ attorney general. She found them online, at https://www.guidestar.org.

The GuideStar Web site is a project of Philanthropic Research Inc., a public charity founded in Williamsburg, Va., in 1994 to make information about the operations and finances of nonprofit organizations as accessible to the public as possible. One way they do it is by putting those organizations’ tax returns online. Currently, more than 640,000 public charities are in their database, with more than 200,000 tax returns posted. (And yes, the tax returns for Philanthropic Research Inc. are among them.)

From the comfort of your kitchen table, you can while away the hours perusing the 800-plus pages of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s combined returns for 1997 and 1998--there is a time lag in filing and posting returns--and discover, for example, that profits from its cafes range between $5 million and $6 million annually. Or, you can marvel at how the worldwide aspirations of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum empire can be streamlined into just 25 pages.

There’s also plenty of amusing fuel for cocktail party chatter. Like finding which foundation has in the past five years poured more than $2.7 million--including payments on the artist’s home mortgage--into Jim Turrell’s plan to turn an Arizona volcano into an earthwork. (The project has been underway for nearly 30 years, and although it was supposed to have debuted last fall, the opening has been indefinitely postponed.) Or discovering which art museum paid more than $1 million into its director’s supplemental retirement fund in 1998.

But the GuideStar principle is finally more important than merely offering a voyeur’s window onto a world where the blinds are usually closed. Adequate information on public charities such as art museums and art foundations is essential for potential donors, large or small, who are interested in assessing the organizations’ effectiveness. And because charities are tax-exempt, every citizen is in effect already a donor. A tax return is certainly not the whole story, but it’s one critical piece of the puzzle. The digital revolution and the Internet have given us the most efficient, cost-effective means for making this information broadly available.

Federal law requires a charity to send a copy of its tax return--Form 990--for a reasonable charge to anyone who asks. But try that cumbersome route sometime. In the past, the only sure way to gain access to these public records was a trip to the state capital and the attorney general’s office. Now, individual states have also begun to put these forms online (nonprofits in California can be accessed at the attorney general’s Web site-- https://caag.state.ca.us/charities). But GuideStar is compiling a national database. And it’s a good thing it is. Charitable records weren’t online last summer in the great state of Texas, but a reporter at her keyboard in Fort Worth was able to log onto a Web site based in Virginia and retrieve what she needed.

In October, the Fortsons announced they would no longer take compensation for serving on the Kimbell board. Without the Internet, who knows how long that board would have continued to quietly pay a couple of its members hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual salaries, bonuses and benefits?

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic. He can be reached at christopher.knight@latimes.com.