Rafael Rozendaal's Abstract Browsing (2014–ongoing) entered MoMA's collection in 2024, marking a quiet but consequential shift in how museums process the aesthetics and infrastructure of the internet. The work is a browser plugin that replaces the visual content of any website with geometric abstractions derived from the site's underlying code. Text becomes bars, images become blocks, links pulse as interactive fields. The browser remains functional—you can still click, scroll, navigate—but the web is rendered as a grid of color and shape, a Mondrian pulled live from HTML.
MoMA's acquisition recuperates this gesture within the museum's long project of domesticating the readymade. Rozendaal's plugin does not critique the browser; it aestheticizes it. The work treats the browser as Duchamp treated the urinal: by reframing an industrial object as an art object, it asks us to see form where we previously saw only function. But where Duchamp's gesture depended on institutional displacement—moving the urinal from the bathroom to the gallery—Rozendaal's work remains embedded in its original infrastructure. The browser is both the medium and the site. The museum can acquire the code, but it cannot move the work. It can only point.
This raises the question MoMA has been quietly negotiating since it began collecting websites, software, and video games in the early 2000s: what does it mean to own a work that cannot be removed from circulation? Abstract Browsing is free, open-source, and infinitely reproducible. Anyone can download it. The museum's acquisition does not restrict access or create scarcity. What MoMA has purchased is not the object but the right to claim it—a certificate, a position in the ledger, a form of social capital that operates more like a blockchain token than a painting. The work circulates freely; the institution collects its legitimacy.
Rozendaal has long understood that distribution is constitutive of meaning in network art. His early website works—byebyecamera.com (2005), fallingfalling.com (2011)—were structured as domain names, artworks that existed as URLs before they existed as images. The title is the location; the work is its address. This is conceptual art updated for an era in which circulation precedes production. The work does not need to be seen in a gallery to function as art; it only needs to be referenced, linked, embedded. The browser is the frame, the URL is the signature, and the network is the exhibition space.
Abstract Browsing extends this logic by making the browser itself the site of aesthetic transformation. The plugin does not generate new content; it remediates existing content. It is a filter, a stylesheet, a performance that happens in real time every time a page loads. The aesthetic is procedural, not authorial. Rozendaal sets the parameters—color palette, abstraction logic, degree of interactivity—but the output is determined by the structure of the site being viewed. The work is a score, not a composition. This positions it clearly within the lineage of Sol LeWitt's instruction-based drawings and John Cage's chance operations, but with a crucial difference: the execution is automated. The user does not perform the work; the browser does.
This automation is where the work becomes diagnostic rather than merely formal. Abstract Browsing reveals the grid beneath the web, the underlying structure that determines where text appears, how images are sized, which elements are clickable. It makes visible the logic of layout, the architecture of attention. Every website, no matter how chaotic or maximalist its surface design, resolves into a clean geometric composition when filtered through Rozendaal's plugin. The web, it turns out, is already a grid. We just needed an artist to make it legible.
But what is being aestheticized here? If the readymade traditionally operated by framing industrial objects as art, Abstract Browsing frames data structures as art. The plugin does not care what the website says or sells; it only reads how the site is built. This is formalism for the age of the DOM (Document Object Model), a purely structural aesthetic that treats HTML as sculpture. In this sense, the work aligns with the minimalist project of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin: it isolates form, removes content, and presents the result as sufficient. But where minimalism depended on physical materials—steel, fluorescent tubes, plywood—Rozendaal's work depends on code, which means it is always contingent, always one server failure or browser update away from breaking.
This precarity is not incidental. It is the material condition of all network art. Abstract Browsing exists only as long as browsers support plugins, only as long as websites are structured in HTML, only as long as the web operates under its current protocols. The work is not durable in the way a painting or sculpture is durable. It is a temporary alignment of technical systems, a snapshot of a particular moment in the evolution of digital infrastructure. MoMA's acquisition does not preserve the work; it documents a configuration that will eventually become obsolete.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the museum's engagement with software art. By collecting Abstract Browsing, MoMA asserts that the work is significant enough to be remembered, but the form of that memory is radically unstable. The institution can store the code, maintain a reference implementation, even run the plugin on a dedicated machine in the gallery. But it cannot guarantee that the work will function in ten years, let alone fifty. The archive becomes a kind of curatorial performance, a continuous act of maintenance rather than a fixed repository. The museum is forced to become what it has historically resisted: a custodian of process rather than object, infrastructure rather than artifact.
Rozendaal's work does not resist this condition; it embraces it. Abstract Browsing was never meant to be permanent. It was always a filter, a lens, a way of seeing the web at a particular moment before moving on. The plugin's longevity is less important than its circulation. What matters is how many people installed it, how many screenshots were shared, how many designers and developers saw the web differently because of it. The work's value is not in its preservation but in its dispersion, its capacity to reformat attention across thousands of individual browsers.
This is where Rozendaal's practice intersects most clearly with the market logic that now structures digital art. Abstract Browsing does not need to be owned to have value; it needs to be cited. The MoMA acquisition does not create scarcity; it creates canonization. It transforms a free browser plugin into a historically significant artwork, which in turn drives demand for Rozendaal's limited-edition website works and NFTs, which do operate within markets of artificial scarcity. The museum legitimizes the free work, which legitimizes the for-sale work, which funds the production of more free work. The circulation of legitimacy becomes a form of capital accumulation that runs parallel to—and ultimately supports—the circulation of commodities.
This is not a critique of Rozendaal, who has been transparent about this structure. It is an observation about how value is produced in the circulation era. The museum can no longer function as the sole gatekeeper of legitimacy, but it can still amplify and redirect legitimacy flows. MoMA's acquisition of Abstract Browsing does not remove the work from the network; it places a marker within the network, a node that signals "this matters." The institution's power is no longer the power to sequester and preserve. It is the power to index and elevate, to shape what gets remembered within an infrastructure designed for endless flow.
The browser, in this sense, is not just the medium of Abstract Browsing. It is the medium of the museum's own transformation. Both are interfaces for navigating an overwhelming volume of content. Both operate by filtering, framing, and presenting selections as coherent wholes. And both are increasingly understood not as containers but as portals—mechanisms for access rather than ownership, circulation rather than possession. Rozendaal's readymade is also a mirror. The museum sees itself reflected in the browser's chrome.