The Expansion of Art through Cultural Postproduction in Online Virtual Museums

Online virtual museums transform art exhibitions into sites of cultural postproduction. Audiences see photographic replicas of artworks instead of the original artworks, and together these images and originals extend the "aura" for the artworks, thereby opening the narrative framework of the museum. A fragmentary, interactive, and constantly-developing virtual knowledge system has replaced the traditional museum. The fusion of humans and machines has changed how viewers approach knowledge, and the virtual and the real together constitute a mixed reality, sparking new negotiations between audiences and artworks. Through hyperlinks, online museums can bring together art, society, and viewers anytime and anywhere; through the perpetual creation of new encounters, innovative cultural environments provide a continually-changing art world with the sustained motivations and raw materials for cultural production, thereby enriching our cultural ecology.