THERE ARE MANY THEORIES about why people collect art. But whatever subjective reason or desire motivates an individual collector, their collection invariably becomes an object of public scrutiny. Art is a public affair—and sooner or later every collection becomes presented to the public view. And in the public space, every collection becomes an exhibition, and every collector becomes a curator. Some collectors try to avoid this moment of turning a collection into an exhibition. Other collectors build private museums or donate their collections to public museums but at the same time try to secure that their collections will not be dispersed and, thus, continue to demonstrate the personal tastes of and choices by their collectors/curators. Private collectors and curators are also often subjected to a similar critique: they are accused of being selective and imposing their personal taste on the general public. The history of collections and exhibitions is the history of struggle against selectivity and for more inclusivity. However, today this struggle seems to have reached its endpoint and lost its relevance. The reason for this development is the emergence of the Internet.

The Internet has no curators. Here everyone can produce texts and images—and make them accessible to the whole world. As a result, the Internet offers the technology that makes art production and distribution relatively cheap and easily available for an individual. Potentially everyone can use a photo or video camera to produce images, a text-processing program to add commentaries, and the Internet to distribute the results on a global scale—avoiding any kind of censorship or selection process. At first glance the Internet seems to be the end of all selectivity. The relationship between the space of museum or private collections and the Internet is, as a rule, imagined as a relationship between the global, unified space of the Internet and the “limited” space of the museum and, for that matter, the limited space of the whole art system.

In practice, however, the Internet leads not to the emergence of a universal public space but to the tribalization of the public. The Internet is an extremely narcissistic medium—it is a mirror of our specific interests and desires.