In the beginning of May 1999, dBONANZAh! registered two domain names.



SMAK.ORG

MUHKA.ORG







S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent) and MUHKA (MUseum 

voor Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen) are two prominent Flemish (Belgian) 

contemporary art museums; during recent years both (especially S.M.A.K., 

under curatorship of the infamous Jan Hoet, remember Documenta IX) have 

received considerable governmental support and corporate sponsorship, 

and both have established important, though rather unconsistent, 

collections of late 20th century artworks.



For a long time dBONANZAh! had been wondering whether it was mere 

ignorance or even blatant prejudice that kept both museums from paying 

any attention to developments in digital and internet art. Wasn't it Jan 

Hoet who once, years ago, shocked a whole digital art crowd of artists 

and theorists at a festival, by stating "I don't see any art here"? So, 

dBONANZAh! decided to take some action, on the special occasion of the 

grand opening of the renovated S.M.A.K.



Two fake websites were created. They are both archived here. MUHKA.ORG 

turned out to become a parody and hilarious collage of the few snippets 

of info about the museum that could be collected on various  dispersed 

sites (developing a proper, even simple, website was not an issue at all 

for MUHKA), SMAK.ORG became a spontaneous and mixed collection of 

renowned net.artworks (Daniel Andujar - vuk.org - lfoundation.org), 

examples of so-called digital 'cultural resistance' (RTMark - gwbush.com - 

freespeech.org) and cheerful products from net.practitioners (claus - 

yfcf - cassandra.be). The collection, frozen at this moment, is still 

very much worth the while.



Many visitors got completely fooled. Others were indignant. Some showed 

great enthusiasm. Less sense of humor became apparent when, in the 

beginning of 2000, S.M.A.K. threatened the makers of their (worthy) 

cybersquat with legal action. A dialogue was initiated and initial hard 

words were withdrawn; some hope was expressed that dBONANZAh!s message 

somehow had seeped through. Both projects came to an end, allowing 

dBONANZAh! to invest its modest (its very own) financial means into 

other projects (so keep posted!), eagerly awaiting meaningful 

initiatives from the Belgian contemporary art and museum scene.



rammeke.pic@dbonanzah.org



http://www.dbonanzah.org/mu-sqat/muhka/

http://www.dbonanzah.org/mu-sqat/smak/



See also:

http://www.dbonanzah.org/mu-sqat/smak/manifesto.html

http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/wilma_glimpse/nettime?query=smak