ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of whether net art might be successfully deployed in an exposure of art history's latent problem with technology by demonstrating the wider implications of net art's art-historical absenteeism, by problematizing' art history. Twenty-five years after the inception of the internet, art and the internet met. Critic Robert Atkins marks the mid-1990s as a seminal moment for art history. The novelty of net art lies in the amplification and realization of earlier art concepts in a new, personalized media field. Offline art and technology centres and discursive arenas were also forming and engaging with net art. Large centres such as Der Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, opened in 1989, and Tokyo's Intercommunication Centre. Nochlin used the situation compounding a distinct lack of accounts of women artists in the history of art to reason that art-historical discourse had been structured in such a way as to facilitate the disavowal of women artists.
