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1   This is an essay about contemporary art that includes no examples It includes no examples because its subject – artists’ websites, their form and function, and the possibilities they hold – is prone to constant change This text is an attempt to document a thing always fleeting – the aesthetics of the web – without fixing it, since it begins with a concern about growing uniformity and ends with a call for change   The web has redefined research in the visual arts: sifting through images online The proliferation of images on the internet has changed the way we look at art because we are exposed to an unprecedented deluge of images online The visual literacy developed as a result informs both the making and viewing of art, but it has not chipped away at the primacy of the gallery or museum as the site for encountering it The physical experience of viewing art is, nonetheless, different as a result of the way we use the internet: the body in the gallery space engages with the work by way of selfies, by way of directing a camera The result, however, is the further addition of images to an internet already full to the brim   To paraphrase Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović’s 1994 banner embroidered with the claim that ‘an artist who cannot speak English is no artist’, today one could say that a young artist who doesn’t have a website is no artist Stilinović comes to mind because his maxim is a statement about access and the prerequisites for participation in the art industry English still dominates, but today there’s also the stipulation to participate in the image culture online For an artist to have a website is almost a generational marker: many artists who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s settle for a Wikipedia entry or a page on their gallery’s website It’s not that they have no stake in how their work is presented online, simply that since they rose to prominence before having a website was the norm (not to say requirement), they never caught up