Everyone is a critic and art critic web sites are a fascinating genre of their own. It was like opening Pandora's box. As we had just announced the winner of our Young Art Critics Online project (see the Artists in Residence section on www.thisisthelakedistrict.co.uk) curiosity got the better of me. How do their sites measure up?

Navigating for art critics The International Association of Art Critics web site at http://www.aica-int.org/ is very non-descript. Grey and black lettering on a white background. It also hadn't been updated since autumn last year. Perhaps the Master International Public Association of Artists and Art Critics http://master.iatp.by/ would reveal something valuable. It hails from Belarus and is also out of date. Its American cousin at www.aicausa.org was more colourful.

The site www.art-navigator.com pointed me to the Austrian AICA site. It appears I am in a never-ending circle. Despite the vast number of iatp sites picked by the search engine, the search continues for something more current.

Techno-art Another clever but out of date site is http://www.techno-impressionist.com/. It offers a critics link in the Library section and comments about the site were received from around the world. It does house a large online collection of techno impressionist works and is worth exploring.

The web site for artist James Laurence Isherwood, www.isherwoodart.co.uk/art_critics.htm, has a comprehensive critics page, including a comment from L.S. Lowry. This one man's site seemed to speak volumes.

Enclyopedias of art and critics If you want to be a critic, visit http://en.wikipedia.org. This site is a free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Very interactive. Click on the Culture Art Art Critics section and the door to online criticism opens for all to enter. The site has been live since 2001 and it has more than 464,000 articles for you to browse.

There is also www.fineartcritic.com, that posts images and you can register and put your comments on. This is a young site, and you could be one of the first to voice your opinion. Or you might find www.art-online.com, a site for journalists and critics, helpful as it has information on art history, artists, art galleries and even employment in the field.

For an umbrella site for artists with searchable databases including more than a 1,000 artists and 15 categories visit www.electroniccottage.com. This is quite a new site but has a lot to offer especially if you want to shop for art online.

Pandora's box is open, but there is room for more lots of room. If you are an art critic, or interested in the field, the Internet appears to still be a blank or mostly blank canvass on this topic.

New on thisis...

Our third annual Young Art Critics Online programme has a winner. The project is run with Abbot Hall each year. Read the winning review in our Artists in Residence section.

Valentines online: Visit our friends at Sub Rosa, the virtual restaurant for some hot tipshttp://www.subrosa.arbre.us/...

Top 10: Yahoo.com has just listed its top ten sites for 2004. Visit them to find out why eggbaconchipsandbeans was up there!