I would like to respond, breifly, to Catherine David's statements on the current state of the art object-- specifically within the context of a virtual space. The disappearing object in art is of certain relavance to comtemporary artists whose interests remain in the process of creativity and not the (co)modification of it.
Artists who work with digital media find themselves rather comfortable creating "immaterial" artworks. While it is true that the immateriality of the work itself can and often times does symbollically refer to an absence and the disappearance of the real; at the same time it can be a form of liberation away from the structures of the institutions toward the power embeded within the individual artist.
As artists begin to limit what can be materially possesed (while increasing their creative output) the ways in which their work is presented can remain within the reaches of the artist herself. Finally, as artists use internet technologies to engage in a global dialogue with other artists the emphasis on the materiality of the work begins to diminish as their intellectual impact upon eachother increases.