Andrew LaVallee

The Web is full of content that only its creator could love. Witness the office-party photos, blogs about people’s pets and bad lip-synched videos that turn up in a few minutes of Google-fueled procrastination.

To Guthrie Lonergan, however, Web junk is the basis of his most popular online art. “I’m sort of interested in that boringness,” he says.

“Internet Group Shot” is one example. The collage, cobbled from dozens of group portraits, shows how people adopt the same huddle when they’re saying “cheese.” For “MySpace Intro Playlist,” Mr. Lonergan looked for the self-made videos that young people post to their personal pages, then strung them together to show how teenagers tend to act similarly and say the same things when they’re introducing themselves.

“There are defaults in our culture,” Mr. Lonergan adds. “MySpace doesn’t set up something for you to create an introduction video, but kind of like a telephone answering machine, you assume a certain kind of voice and say certain things.”

The 23-year-old, who lives in L.A., is one of many artists mining Internet culture for creative inspiration. They make videos out of email spam and multimedia projects from MySpace profiles, and make a case for Web surfing as an art form in itself.

Read Even Boring Blogs Can Be Things of Beauty

A forthcoming exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art will feature work selected by unlikely curators: visitors to the YouTube video-sharing site.

MoMA solicited videos to be included in a retrospective of the Residents, an avant-garde multimedia group, that will open next week. The museum has posted the clips of 11 finalists on YouTube and invited the public to weigh in. The votes and comments those works receive on the site will help determine which are screened at the museum.

It is among the latest moves by museums to capitalize on the popularity of online communities and remain relevant to the new generation of art fans. London’s Saatchi Gallery is sponsoring what it calls “the first reader-curated contemporary art show” later this month, in which online voters picked the participants. In New York, the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has this year expanded the prestigious awards it bestows on artists, adding a “people’s design award” based on votes from visitors to the museum’s Web site.

Meanwhile, the New York’s Pace/MacGill Gallery staged a summer show based on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Pace/MacGill’s project, called “Self-Portraitr,” included nearly 130,000 user-submitted photos, and drew a younger-than-usual audience — one of the goals of the exhibit, a gallery spokeswoman said.

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In the 1996 blockbuster “Mission: Impossible,” the secret agent played by Tom Cruise uses email to set a trap for one of his adversaries – a shadowy, Bible-quoting figure he knows only as “Max.”

Mr. Cruise’s character uses a laptop to compose an email message addressed to “Max@Job 3:14.” Once he clicks the “send” button, the email is carried away in an oversized on-screen envelope, complete with postage stamp. In the real world, such a message would set the stage for a bounce-back error message, not an action/adventure thriller.

Ten years after “Mission: Impossible,” Hollywood still has a spotty track record when it comes to portraying computers and the Internet. Some portrayals are so absurd as to leave viewers wondering if the film’s producers use the same Internet they do.

“The thing that always gets me is watching people send emails,” said Harry Knowles, a self-described tech geek and online film critic who runs Ain’t It Cool News, a popular movie-industry site. “You click ’send’ and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.”

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