he levels rise up endlessly. The structure is immense, intricate, a circular web of connecting cells grotesque in sheer girth, with no vanishing point in sight. The image is "The Tower of Babel," by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. And now, 433 years after Bruegel painted it, a computer search to find the picture on line proves tellingly, deliciously labyrinthine. It's a voyage into a virtual world that, depending on your point of view, either complements the world of physical objects or threatens to subsume it.

Using Yahoo!, a directory service on the global Internet that says it can locate more than 10 million cyberspace addresses, a search for The Tower of Babel calls up 422 entries, from Biblical references to programming-language chatter. But not a single one reveals an on-line location for the painting.

 Another directory, Lycos, and another search, for Vienna Kunst-historisches, the museum that owns the picture, brings up 5,128 more entries. Nice if you happen to have the next 12 months free to noodle dreamily through the delirium of information. But who can resist looking at "Austria's Imperial Cities," an exhibition at the museum, or reading an illustrated history of Gustav Klimt, or even spending time with Vienna Online, which delivers local weather and 18 other Austrian on-line connections? Still, no luck with the painting in question.

Finally, a search for the painter strikes art-history gold. After an hour and a half on this digital trail, the WebMuseum in Paris doles out a pithy biographical sketch of the artist, along with two versions of the painting in luminous, pixelated color.

Bruegel (and Genesis 11, where the story of Babel was told) was right, it seems: right about this human lust for information; right about the ambition to build monuments to our sprawling curiosity; right (if he could have known) about the Internet.

 The art world, never allergic to a social trend and recovering from the bust that followed the market boom of the 1980's, has been quietly but intently gravitating to that gravityless, giddy boom town in cyberspace called the World Wide Web, where text and pictures are easily displayed on what are known as sites or pages.
 

 Still, this is small change considering the vastness of the net, which has more than 10 million addresses.

Exploring art sites remains a relatively elite pastime. And those who pursue it may be disappointed to find that the quality of images on computer screens can't compete with glossy magazine reproductions. Even high-resolution pictures on-line appear relatively grainy.

 Yet that drawback fades in light of the basic fact of the Internet's freedom from physical bounds. Andrè Malraux once wrote that the revolution of photographic reproduction created a "museum without walls." The Internet is the great flowering of that idea. Works of art from around the world, both originals and reproductions, have never been so easy to access -- once you actually find what you're looking for.
 

f you want to see who's showing at the Pace Wildenstein Galleries in New York and Los Angeles, simply go to their web site for a schedule, along with pictures of and by all of their artists. You can tour the Whitney Museum of American Art or the Metropolitan or, for that matter, the Pushkin in Moscow or the Art Tower Mito in Japan. Their sites offer floor plans, pictures from the galleries, exhibitions, curators' essays and, of course, gift shops.

 You can order catalogues from Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses and see which antique automobiles and Impressionist paintings will be on the block. You can look into artist grants on Arts Wire, read the latest musings on multiculturalism in the publication Trans> or just surf endlessly through artists' projects available on the artist sites äda 'web and the Thing.

 Of course, like everything else in the art world, judgments about this rush to cyberspace are divided -- in fact, extreme.

 "I find these drastic predictions of art going onto the Internet and leaving the physical world just unfounded," says Michael Govan, director of the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. "There's no question that it will result in greater access to art.

But I don't think that the medium improves the art experience for the viewer."

 "The web is limited," he concludes. "If it's considered supplemental to physical work, it's fine. But when people start talking about it as the primary experience, there are big problems."

 For the baby boomers and their elders, the attractions of digitalart may well be limited. Consider Wolfgang Staehle, who started the Thing, an electronic bulletin board for artists that now has a web site replete with digital work, on-line chat and art reviews. He has already become nostalgic for paint and plaster.

"I appreciate the new technology," he says. "But the more I work with it, the more I appreciate painting and sculpture. I miss the physicality of the traditional media."
 

"But down the line, younger people who grew up on digital delivery systems for all kinds of entertainment and education will have another view. Virtual art will be just as much a visceral art form for them as painting and sculpture. Maybe more so."

 At the moment, the content can be pretty thin, many art on-liners agree. For every substantial museum site like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's, for every sophisticated work like David Blair's deeply surreal "Waxweb," in which bees commune with the spirit world, there are many, many more that carry minimal information, few images, poor writing and unsatisfying art that feels as if it's still waiting to happen. In defense of the technology, its champions say that the tools for colonizing cyberspace have just begun to appear. And they add that the web "democratizes," that it levels the playing field.

 "We're talking about democratizing works of art in our collections, not cheapening the experience," says Maxwell Anderson, who heads the information technology committee of the Association of Art Museum Directors and directs the Art Gallery of Ontario. "We want to make things easier for people who are not art experts by preparing them with information they can get on line, before they come to the museum. No one likes to be intimidated."

Janine Cirincione, former director of the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York and now the producer of art content for the Microsoft Network, puts it bluntly: "How many times have you walked into an art gallery and been snubbed by the person behind the desk? Art on the Internet isn't threatening. Go when you feel like it. Stay as long as you want."

 Stay as long as you want, but who, while you contemplate, is paying the rent? Sotheby's declined to say how much it spends on creating and maintaining its elegant site; a guess of $100,000 was met with mild evasiveness, suggesting that that figure was low. For the time being, the cost is considered an advertising expense. Mr. Staehle says his overhead for the Thing approaches $10,000 a month. That has led him to create a sideline enterprise offering Internet access to individuals for $25 a month and to businesses for a higher fee.
 

oseph Squier, an artist whose "The Place" is considered a web classic, with its mysterious assemblages of haunting images and poetic texts, says: "I don't have problems with getting paid for what I do. In this new medium, if you think of artists as content providers rather than as object producers, then a whole other economic model emerges, which is the music business.

"The way the art world works, basically a few wealthy people buy the content. With music, nobody confuses live performance with a recording. Anyone can go into a store, lay down a few bucks and walk out with the music. So, in a sense, it's like being a studio artist. I could sell copies. Every time someone wants to download an image, you charge them a small fee."

 Mr. Anderson talks about museums one day charging an annual fee to a new, digital membership. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the best-selling author of "Being Digital," replied to an E-mail query with the prediction that the web would give artists new access to the public, enabling them to short-circuit the gallery system. "Sell direct!" he said.

 "The bad news for consumers and buyers," Mr. Negroponte continued, "is that the-signal-to-noise ratio will skyrocket in the absence of professional and collective judgments." And who will provide the judgments to filter it all? That is where galleries and museums claim they can play the same role as educators and editors in cyberspace as they do in the physical world.

 "We have the honor," says David A. Ross, director of the Whitney Museum, "of containing within our walls the original works that have been deemed critically important. In the age of the web, an economy of images and texts will demand even more selection. In a sense, the museum has got to become your home page, the place where you start out to find what's good and interesting. And that's just half the story. The other half is the creative side, becoming a sponsor for original works, as we recently have with a $50,000 grant."

 "The fact is," Mr. Ross continues, "this new form offers us the opportunity for a new kind of original, so you can't say, 'Been there, done that.' There's no end to this journey. The vanishing point has disappeared."