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.

Unlike in a “real” gallery, where an artist would have to worry about the effects of the environment (such as works getting wet and moldy) Filthy’s Second Life space is open-air, with a lagoon running through it. You can even take an inner-tube tour.

“Artists who make art in Second Life—at least the good ones—really capitalize on the fact that their creations are not confined to earthly laws of gravity and physics,” Lipsky told me. “Since much of my artwork is inspired by people, places, and events in Second Life, I’m blurring the gap between Second Life and real life.”

He added that marketing is much easier in Second Life, where people tend to be less inhibited and more willing to listen.

And the aggressive self-promotion he has done in the virtual word has paid off in real life. As a result of his Second Life celebrity, Lipsky has been featured in the Boston Globe, invited to exhibit in shows all over the world, and sold a glut of works—so many that he has been able to quit his day job as executive director of the Munroe Center for the Arts.

Lipsky’s real-life artworks start at $1,000, while Filthy sells the jpeg versions for 4,000 to 30,000 “Linden Dollars,” Second Life’s currency (the exchange rate as of May 22 was about $1 U.S. to 266 Linden Dollars). That price is pretty steep for a Second Life work; other artists told me that as little as 100 Linden Dollars is considered expensive because jpegs are available in unlimited editions, and it doesn’t cost anything to duplicate them.

However, Lipsky says he does limit reproduction of some of his works. Songs of the IBM, which was a commission, is unavailable for purchase in real life or Second Life.

mrY Tully

If Filthy Fluno represents the sleek, market-driven side of Second Life art, Campbell’s avatar, mrY Tully, is the opposite—he takes a more casual approach and loves the Second Life art scene because of its great distance from the complexities and economics of the real-life equivalent.

Campbell has been creating experimental artworks in Second Life for more than a year, and he has used those works as part of his real-life thesis project at Yale. While he incorporates ideas from his oil-on-canvas paintings into his Second Life works, he also makes pieces that are unique to Second Life, using the program’s interface and building tools.

Campbell’s online creations—such as a parade of huge, levitating sculptures that spans nine city blocks, and a mysterious, unfinished game where participants enter a series of floating rooms in a quest to solve a riddle—could never be replicated in real life, given zoning restrictions, the monumental space and funds required, and, of course, gravity. But on Second Life they are hardly a stretch.

“Second Life offers more,” Campbell said, as he introduced me (or should I say, Inky?) to a “sandbox”—one of several open spaces Linden Labs provides in Second Life for users to experiment with building and testing objects.

In the sandbox, MrY zoomed around at Inky’s feet, and, like a magician, kept making more and more artworks pop up in the space. There were 3-D sculptures, paintings (some incorporating the “texture” of Campbell’s real-life works), intricate installations, giants, and—my favorite—a pair of flying fish that trailed behind Inky and kept popping like balloons. “You can definitely do things [here] you can’t do in real life,” Campbell said.

Soon, mrY’s friend, (the walking traffic light I told you about) who goes by the name CameronSabroso Montgolfier, joined us to show off an exquisitely detailed miniature golf course he had built (Campbell said he has been collaborating with Cameron on Second Life for several months, but he still doesn’t know his real name).

The two boasted about their avatars for a while, informed Inky she looked too “normal” (even with the wings), and explained that creating wacky personas is just as important to Second Life artists as the artworks themselves.

“We spend a lot of time talking about them,” Campbell said.

Chatting with other artists is one of the main draws of Second Life, he added. “You can talk to people from all over the world. It’s bizarre who you’ll run into—I think the best work [comes out of] those conversations.”

Sometimes those conversations bleed over into real life, too. At a recent open studio at Yale, a visitor was able to identify Campbell after noticing similarities between his real-life and Second Life works. “It was a really weird experience,” Campbell said.

And this is where Campbell differs most from artists like Lipsky. If Campbell is recognized offline, it is a total coincidence, because he doesn’t promote his real-life works in Second Life, and he doesn’t sell his Second Life creations.

“I don’t really buy into that,” he said. “I usually give [my artworks] away. In Second Life, it’s an economy of abundance. It’s the total opposite of real life, because everything is reproducible. Building things is free, and you can make an infinite number of copies.”

He views Second Life as a practice studio and marketplace of ideas. “I just meet people and build things,” he explained. “I say, ‘That’s really cool what you’re doing. Why did you do it? And here’s what I’m doing.’ It can be just a really simple, innocent way to make art.”

Just Beginning

According to artist and Second Life art expert Richard Minsky, the online art community has tens of thousands of participants. He said a recent count tallied at least 700 Second Life galleries—and that’s not including museums, artist colonies, projects such as Campbell’s, and countless other online creations that can’t even be defined.

The sheer volume is one of the reasons Minsky created SLART, a magazine devoted to all things art-related in Second Life. The Web version is available now, and a print edition launches this summer.

“I saw the need [for a magazine] my first week in Second Life,” Minsky said. “There were many art galleries, with everything from startling innovation to shopping mall kitsch. I looked for a review that might serve as a guide and forum for critical thinking about art issues in Second Life, and there was none.”

Minsky, who plans to distribute free copies of the magazine at the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago in August, said circulation numbers won’t be available until the print version hits newsstands. However, on last count, more than 1,000 users had logged onto the SLART Web site in just two days. “In the beginning of April there were about 500 sessions in a week,” he said. “Now there can be more than that in one day. I expect that in a month or two it will be over 1,000 per day.”

Those growing numbers show the virtual art scene has only just begun, he said. “It's in its infancy now—there's a great pioneering spirit in the air.”

Inky’s Choice

After spending a few days with Filthy Fluno, mrY Tully, and their companions, I began to realize that if I wanted to fully capture the pioneering spirit that Minsky talks of, if I wanted to tell you about all the artistic endeavors happening in Second Life, I’d have to forget about my first life and disappear into the virtual world for years, maybe even forever.

I’m not ready to commit that much time to Second Life. After all, I do have a first life, where there are just as many artworks to see. And Lipsky warned me about “getting lost in Second Life and not spending enough time in your real life.”

But that doesn’t mean you won’t catch a glimpse of Inky wandering the Second Life galleries and sandboxes from time to time, or maybe even trying her hand at some of her own artworks—she’s not ready to disappear from the Second Life art scene quite yet. In fact, I think she’s hooked.