More reminiscing about And/Or Gallery:
They also did a show putting YTMND (what we would now call a meme site) into a gallery setting. There has been writing praising sites like YTMND and 4Chan for their participatory democracy art model, which is kind of BS because there is no reversibility: to these sites the art world is just a bunch of [insert gay slur]. The YTMND forum thread about the And/Or show pretty much proved this. (Hat tip to RA.)
The best reason for people with MFAs to appreciate sites like YTMND is the same reason everyone else appreciates them: because they're funny. Also there is art in the way pages are put together and a kind of shared meta-critical attitude about the Web and the world. But you can keep your Nicolas Bourriaud references: it's so colonial and Margaret Mead to talk about sites that way, and the natives ain't having it. Guthrie Lonergan's text on the And/Or page makes the case well (also published as text-to-speech on YTMND - am sure they hated it).