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Perhaps the best thing about Firefox is the Ad Block Plus add-on. Face it, the web looks better without ads. But what if, instead of just collapsing the page space where the ads were, you filled that space with art?
That's the idea behind [AddArt, a new Firefox extension][1] that wants to bring contemporary art to the masses. Currently the AddArt extension is just a prototype and frankly doesn't work that well, but the concept is promising.
At the moment, if you install AddArt, the only image that will be filled in is a rather tacky American flag and eagle image -- not really a good way to attract international support -- but imagine that replaced with contemporary art images and you'll see the genius of AddArt.
The website details the projects aims:
>The project will be supported by an small website providing information on the current artists and curator, along with a schedule of past and upcoming AddArt shows. Each 2 weeks will include 5-8 artists selected by emerging and established curators. Images will have to be cropped to standard banner sizes or can be custom made for the project. Artists can target sites (such as every ad on FoxNews.com) and/or default to any page on the internet with ads. One artist will be shown per page. The curatorial duty will be passed among curators through recommendations, word of mouth, and solicitations to the AddArt site.
It sounds like a great way of artists to get their work noticed by a wider audience and to do something with otherwise dead space in your browser.
Of course many will argue that blocking ads deprives sites of a revenue stream, which is true, but, I would argue, not the users problem. When a revenue stream dries up, it's up the content producer to find a new one.
AddArt is far from complete, I got a number of errors using it (note that if you're using Ad Block Plus, you'll need to disable it to use AddArt since the two conflict) and it doesn't block many ads, but if the project gets enough support, I could see it catching on with users.
[1]: http://www.addart.eyebeam.org/ "AddArt: Firefox Browser Extension"
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