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Lovink’s chapter on internet culture starts a critique at the institutional level of the wherefores and wherefore-nots of new media art. It hasn't taken off. It doesn't know where to be. Or the artists aren't very good at placing it. When it is placed, it is placed as ART, which recreates the modernist split between cultures. (Or, worse, it is placed as helpmate and personal affirmation) Institutional support for new media as a new media is either nonexistent or poorly placed between, Lovink writes, between convention demos and museum curation. Consider, for instance, where it is placed, if at all, at the university. Visual Art? Marketing? Business Administration? Communications? Mass Comm? Does it gave its own place? Does it exist as a discipline? Does it exist only as a distant consumable rather than a creation by artists?

New media artworks are forms in search of a form. They are procedural in the sense of writing material-specific procedures. As test beds they often lack content. Many of the works are neither cool nor ironic, as are so many works of contemporary art. Instead, they often have a playful, naïve feel in that they invite the user to experience alternative interfaces. Many examples of new media art are hot—participatory, dysfunctional, or distributed—frustrating the attempt to detach and frame them in a gallery (like this). New media, to its credit, has been one of the very few art forms that has taken seriously the programmatic wish to blow up the walls of the white cube. This was done in such a systematic manner that it moved itself outside of the art system altogether.“

from “Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture” by Geert Lovink.

Place the study of New Media in Aesthetics. If you don't have an Aesthetics program handy, create one from recycled course outlines. Make it volatile. Encourage the program to explode.