NEW YORK—Over the past several days I have roamed the floors of two large museums, traversed the terrain of easily 50 art galleries, and chatted up a handful of artists—one of whom wore a clown suit and couldn’t have been more than a foot tall. Another looked just like a traffic signal with legs. As for me, I sprouted fairy wings somewhere along the way (but they’re purely cosmetic, given that everyone can fly here—or better yet, teleport). No, we’re not in Chelsea anymore. We’re deep in Second Life.

Since the inception of Linden Lab’s “digital world” four years ago, people have flocked here to create online personas (called avatars) and experience everything from rock concerts to sexual encounters to a virtual stock market. The exact number of visitors is a matter of considerable dispute between Second Life proponents and critics and independent analysts, with estimates ranging between 100,000 and 6 million. Whatever the correct figure, the total is considerable, and it should come as no surprise that Second Life has a thriving art scene.

Artists are online making works, importing jpegs of their real-life paintings, sculptures, and video works, staging arts festivals, setting up colonies, and building everything from austere museums and high-end galleries to grassroots collaborations. There’s also a bustling art market here, with a steady stream of patrons purchasing digital artworks for their virtual homes and businesses—or buying real-life, tangible versions of works they’ve seen in Second Life.

And it gets even more complex. If you thought the forever in-flux, real-life art world was difficult to keep up with, the Second Life scene is even harder to get a handle on. With no physical limitations or bureaucratic red tape such as zoning and licensing, galleries, artists, and trendy cultural spots crop up and disappear faster than you can say SoHo. Not to mention that a foray into Second Life will have you questioning the very definition of art. Shane Campbell (in real life a painter in Yale’s MFA program; in Second Life the tiny clown named mrY Tully), warned me before I went in: “Your ideas will start to change.”

According to another artist, Jeffrey Lipsky, “Nearly everything in Second Life is a form of art”—from the 3-D digital landscape itself, to the avatars people so diligently fashion.  Lipsky, for instance, is a self-described “white Jewish boy” from Massachusetts in real life, but online he’s created an eccentric African-American character known as Filthy Fluno.

Needless to say, with so much information to take in, let alone make sense of, my head was already spinning before I—or, should I say, my avatar, Inky Schnyder—set foot inside Second Life. But I trooped on anyway, and although my explorations didn’t leave me any less confused, there were plenty of artistic adventures to be found.

Filthy Fluno

Filthy Fluno—with his squat stature, unruly, ever-changing afro, snaggletooth, and crafty personality—is something of an art-world celebrity in Second Life. He has built a reputation by chatting up anyone who will listen, and helping new artists get started in their “second lives.” Anywhere you read or talk about the Second Life art scene, Filthy Fluno is bound to be mentioned.

Filthy took Inky for a spin around his Second Life gallery, aptly called Filthy’s. Filthy’s is located on Artropolis, an island Lipsky and other artists created as an online gathering and exhibition space (Lipsky said the island has so far cost about $4,000, which includes the initial price of the virtual land and the monthly “land-use fees” Linden Lab charges).

Filthy’s is chock-full of imported jpegs of Lipsky’s bold, abstract charcoal and pastel works. The original drawings are made in his Tyngsboro, Mass. studio, and images of them are uploaded into Second Life.

Lipsky has created works on paper for both Second Life and real-life acquaintances, and he has also been commissioned and sold pieces in both places. For instance, the IBM Academy of Technology’s Doug McDavid, who goes by Doug Mandelbrot in Second Life, recently commissioned real-life and Second Life versions of the same work, titled Songs of the IBM.