ours before the April 22 opening of the New York Digital Salon art exhibition, Alex Galloway was making sure that "Carnivore," his Internet-based artwork, was running properly. Once or twice a minute, as designed, it would splash a bold streak of color across a large computer screen. A passer-by stopped to watch, and when the screen did not change for an extended time, she asked, "Is it working?" Mr. Galloway replied, "You have to be patient."

Visitors to the Digital Salon have been even more patient. The salon, organized by the School of Visual Arts in New York, has changed little since the first exhibition in 1993. Although the salon has grown from a small display of digital prints into an annual showcase for dozens of Web sites, animated videos and other computer-generated works, many of the same artists were "hung" year after year, making a dynamic genre seem static. As a result, the salon has never produced much excitement, even among its artists. As one recently said of this annual gallery and Web exhibition, it has been the "Digital Sal-yawn."

So for the salon's 10th anniversary its organizers decided to abandon the annual open-call format in which jurors would sift through 1,000 recent works and choose the best. Instead the salon invited 10 new-media curators to review the genre's history and select the 10 works that they each considered to be benchmarks. The list, sort of a 100-piece starter set for the digital-art canon, was published last fall in the electronic-arts magazine Leonardo. (The magazine's contents, including the curators' essays, are on the salon's Web site, at www.nydigitalsalon.org.)

Bruce Wands, the salon's director, said, "The public isn't really sure what digital art is yet." Ideally the salon selections would tell people exactly what it is. To show them, 19 of the works can be viewed in the salon exhibition, "Vectors: Digital Art of Our Time," at the Courtyard Gallery of the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan through May 25.

Is it working? Well, no. If the salon's goal is to introduce audiences to important works in digital-art history, gallery visitors are more likely to leave wondering why these were choosen. Except for a confusing color-coded timeline near the entry and a handout that describes rather than interprets the works, viewers take an unguided tour. And because the works are arranged neither chronologically nor by genre, there is little sense of how the art has progressed or become diverse.

Nor does it help that only a fraction of the roughly 100 artworks is on display. Mr. Wands said that to show all of them would have cost nearly $1 million, and plans for a comprehensive exhibition had to be cut when fund-raising became difficult after 9/11. Still, there are some curious choices among the included works. For instance "Apartment" by Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak was exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 2001 and can be viewed on the Internet. So, why show it again, when Char Davies's virtual-reality works, favored by two curators, have not been in New York since 1995?

Similarly, Mr. Galloway's "Carnivore" deserved better treatment. As he conceived it the piece monitors electronic exchanges between computers, then uses various artists' software to convert them into works that can actually be seen or heard. One of the aims of "Carnivore" is to show how different digital artists use the same raw material to get different results. Yet Mr. Galloway's interpretation is the only one being exhibited. Which is somewhat like going to the "Matisse Picasso" exhibition and then just looking at the Picassos.

What's really missing in an exhibition with 10 diverse curatorial contributors is a firm organizing hand. The World Financial Center's gallery may be lovely as corporate office space goes, but it is far from ideal for exhibiting media art. Save your visit for a rainy day, when sunlight won't wash out the atrium's computer screens.

Timothy Druckrey, an independent curator in New York and editor of "Ars Electronica: Facing the Future" (M.I.T. Press, 2001), a history of the 25-year-old European electronic-arts festival, said that skimpy support for new-media art in the United States made it nearly impossible for cultural institutions here to mount effective retrospectives. They simply don't have the history to support them. It is probably telling that none of the works from any of the nine previous salons was considered good enough to make the greatest-hits lists for the 10th salon.

Mr. Druckrey said that in Europe exhibitions were based on decades of commissions and encouragement for new-media art rather than a sudden shift from open-call competitions. "To attempt to leap into legitimacy in this way demonstrates the woeful condition of media art in the United States," he said of the Digital Salon.

Mr. Wands, who is also director of the graduate computer-art department at the School of Visual Arts, said he was disappointed with the salon's budget-induced limits. He urged visitors to view this year's salon as a group of events, including a recent two-day symposium and some concerts, rather than as a single exhibition. He expressed hope that the show's traveling version would be larger.

Because of the amount of effort involved in developing this year's salon, the 11th edition will not be held until the fall of 2005. By then it may have a harder time attracting an audience. Several competing groups are discussing the possibility of holding festivals in New York and California like the Ars Electronica event in Linz, Austria.

At the same time the biannual Boston Cyberarts Festival is building momentum. The third festival opened there on April 26 and runs through Sunday. Since 1999 its director, George Fifield, has corralled 60 diverse cultural institutions in the Boston area into presenting exhibitions and concerts that coincide with festival events. The festival has a vibrancy that the salon sorely lacks. (A schedule is at bostoncyberarts.org.)

"The artists of the future will have never known a world without computers," Mr. Wands said during his opening remarks for the salon. The Digital Salon has had 10 years to establish itself as an important forum for the digital arts, but so far it has squandered the opportunity. Will the Digital Salon's visitors stay patient? Or will they, like Mr. Galloway's passer-by, simply walk away?