It's cheaper than admission for a museum and you don't have to wait in line. In fact, you do not even have to leave your home to get your daily dose of the visual arts.

Right now art is easier than ever to enjoy because artists have recently expanded their forums from museum walls to the World Wide Web.

At http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/ Visual_Arts/Painting/Artists/ Personal_Exhibits/ there are currently 3,906 artists' personal exhibits listed and the number is growing fast.

This relocation of art to the Web is an interesting phenomenon that raises many questions regarding art's place outside of the traditional museum in the future.

Sarah K. Rich, assistant professor of art history, is teaching a course on digital art this semester and has many thoughts on this trend.

"The Web is a cultural development that forces us to redefine what place is, so that many of the places that we associate with art — exhibition spaces, gallery spaces, and studio spaces -- are in fact made much more fluid by the Internet," Rich said.

Carlos Rosas, associate professor of art, has taught integrative arts courses and agrees that the trend is toward digital.

"More institutions are accepting digitally manipulated work and catering to multimedia," Rosas said.

He feels that an integration between traditional outlets, like museums and newer venues like the Web, is more probable than an actual takeover by digital.

Rich and Rosas see the Web as a place for young artists to get noticed, which explains why so many sites pop up everyday.

Rosas said, "More and more students are creating them. There are tons of advantages because it's your own design practice to showcase your work, and it's such an easy way to create work and your own presentation."

Rich said, "there is extreme potential for young artists to find a detour around the hierarchical art institutions that currently exist. The possibility for distribution for works are much better, however the chances of you making money from that object are compromised."

Rich feels that traditional outlets, like museums, will never become extinct because art, like any industry, is at least in part profit-driven.

"I think that the commercial institutions of art are so invested in the monetary value of objects that it would be unlikely that those institutions would totally allow the dematerialization of art objects that would take place on the Web," Rich said.

"One of the results might be that instead of money being one of the main criterion by which art is evaluated, the Web might release us from such commercial means of evaluation. There are lots of artists that are interested in the problems to politicize or demonstrate the political necessity of allowing the Web to in fact challenge those institutions," she said.

The move from commercial to digital is another step in the evolution of art, and with any shift, people will react, and Rich feels artists will react artistically.

"You can have a lot of art that is about the release of art from the notions of property," she said.

Rich feels that her course is essential for teaching the humanistic approaches to digital technology, which is necessary to appreciate art.

"I hope that that really continues because we need to be aware of the social implications of those new technologies and to equip ourselves with a language that would allow us to think of those new technologies critically," Rich said.