Last year, when the Guggenheim mounted its Nam June Paik retrospective, one installation, The Moon Is the Oldest TV, 1976, stood out for being both poetic and technically refined—and appropriately so: It was commissioned by NASA. Surprisingly, this kind of collaboration between the US government’s space agency and a well-known contemporary artist isn’t all that new. For thirty years, NASA has been recruiting the likes of Mike and Doug Starn, William Wegman, Annie Liebovitz, Chakaia Booker, and, if negotiations go as planned, Mariko Mori, to create space-specific art for the NASA Art Program (www.nasa.gov/gallery/arts/index.html), which currently has about 2,000 works in its collection. Yet according to the program’s director, Bert Ulrich, the current honorarium is a mere $2,500, and artists are usually required to pick up the remainder of the production costs beyond the modest sum.

So why are so many artists so interested? “NASA is once again in the public consciousness, mostly on account of the Mars Pathfinder mission and Apollo 13,” says Ulrich, speaking of the mid-1990s film starring Tom Hanks. “A lot of contemporary artists also grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, when space-exploration themes were popular.”

At the moment, NASA requires artists to give one piece to the agency, but they are welcome to sell any additional work. The program doesn’t yet have its own gallery, but Ulrich hopes a more permanent exhibition space will be established if there continues to be a high level of interest. Some of NASA’s collection is on view at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida through 2003; some can also be found on Art Train, a roving art gallery that began touring the US in 2000.

The first NASA Web-art project, to debut in November, is being developed now by Martin Wattenberg, who had a piece in the Whitney’s recent “Data Dynamics” exhibition. “I think artists like the backdoor access to NASA. How else would they be able to chat up astronauts or witness plasma wave experiments so easily?” asks Ulrich. “Plus their work is an important means for the public to understand what our scientists are working on.”

—Reena Jana, via Art Forum