Rather the opposite from intricate Flash experiments in contemporary web.art is Vuk Cosic's classic 'History of Art for Airports', a simple HTML gallery of pastiches made in 1997 - a long time ago.

Part of the 'Official History of Net.Art, Volume One', Art for Airports spits in two directions, mocking both the artistic vogue for anything 'airport' triggered by Brian Eno's ambient music and the fetishization of pictograms in environments where attention spans of less then a nanosecond rule out any form of communication more complex than a smiley.

For all its tongue-in-cheek cheerfulness, Art for Airports can also be seen as a caustic critique on the reductive and derivative strategies underlying much seemingly well meant attempts to bring art to the masses. I think Cosic's versions of Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase', or Warhol's famous can of 'Campbell's Soup' are very smart, very funny - and deeply tragic.