You can watch a video on modern surrealist Todd Schorr’s latest show at the San Jose Museum of Art.

Get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Eleanor Antin’s photographic series reconstructing the destruction of Troy.

Listen to interviews with conceptual artist Jeff Koons and post-minimalist Richard Tuttle. Or simply check out the minute-long trailer on the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition “Sacred Spain: Art&Belief in the Spanish World.”

Each of these experiences is possible with the click of a mouse on ArtBabble.org, a digital initiative by the IMA in conjunction with more than a dozen museums from around the country and world.

ArtBabble is the only site on the Web devoted exclusively to showcasing art-based digital video — from 30-second trailers advertising exhibitions to 90-minute academic lectures and everything in between.

Since its launch four months ago, ArtBabble.org has attracted 110,000 visitors, with traffic showing a steady and consistent upward trend. Content has grown from 200 to 359 videos, and the average time spent on the site is 4 minutes and 49 seconds.

But, in some ways, the content is the least exciting thing about the site.

The fact that ArtBabble launched with six partners from such cultural heavyweights as The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., is more exciting — and groundbreaking — than simply posting art videos online.

“For it to be successful, it had to be much bigger than the IMA, and had to feature the partnership of museums all over the world of all sizes,” said Daniel Incandela, the IMA’s director of new media. "We were going to do it anyway, but part of the risk was, ‘What if no one wants to join?’ "

Wesley Miller, an associate curator at Art21 Inc., a New York nonprofit organization that produces documentary films and interpretive media focusing on the visual arts, said there was no need for the IMA to worry. Art21 is one of ArtBabble’s six original partners.

“They were working on the kind of idea we wanted to work on, actually,” Miller said. “It was kind of in the air — in the zeitgeist. It needed to exist. So when I heard about this, we thought about it for a split-second and basically invited ourselves without having even seen the product.”

Art21 already has 34 videos on ArtBabble, from an award-winning PBS television series on contemporary art to two-minute video clips on individual artists. It’s also adding three to four videos a week, and hopes to sustain that rate for next year — at least.

“I’m really excited for the day when there are 50 partners, all with a hundred videos,” Miller said.

The IMA’s new-media department is working hard to attract new partners. In July, it added 10 additional institutions, and is in discussions with dozens more. Incandela said most of the museums he contacts are already aware of ArtBabble. Some even approach him.

“It made such a big splash when we launched, we’ve honestly been overwhelmed with the amount of e-mails we’ve received from all over the world with people wanting to join,” Incandela said. “It’s actually kind of hard to keep up with, and has become a second job, which is a great problem to have.”

Edith Schreurs of the digital communications office of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam learned about ArtBabble through Facebook.

“I was very curious about it,” Schreurs said. “I was quite bold and asked what did Daniel (Incandela) think about participating with other museums outside of the United States.”

A few weeks later, they were exchanging e-mails and discussing a pair of videos about Van Gogh’s studio practice, and how the Amsterdam museum had been looking for a better venue for the material.

The Van Gogh Museum is one of 10 recent ArtBabble partners, and Incandela believes partnerships with other institutions will grow exponentially in the same way.

“That has to be our focus,” Incandela said. “If we really want to seize the opportunity to be the online destination for art content, we have to continue to grow, and it has to be much more important than the videos we produce.”

But it’s the high-definition videos — which can be posted only by partnering institutions — that keep people coming back to ArtBabble’s site.

Each video has full text transcription and interactive features like video sharing and viewer discussion. Notes within each video allow visitors to jump from point to point, depending on their interest.

There also are links to additional content related to the video — from art events to Flickr pages to books on Amazon and topics on Wikipedia.

“We’ve been really impressed with the comments, especially when compared with our YouTube experience,” Incandela said. “They’re more thoughtful and focused. Using other sites to promote our work was too segmented. It was like rolling the dice — you weren’t sure what kind of search results you were going to get.”

“YouTube is too much access, too much variety,” Schreurs added. “I was happy to learn about ArtBabble because it’s focused — a very nice platform to show our content. I think the way it is designed and the way you can link to related content or make a note, it gives the videos a more complex edge. The way it is designed also looks very playful.”

One of the most popular videos on ArtBabble is an IMA documentary on Maya Lin’s piece “Above and Below,” which is housed at the museum. The documentary was filmed at the IMA and inside the Bedford caves that inspired the work, among other locations.

Incandela said the IMA plans to produce at least one major documentary a year on a contemporary artist. The next one will be on Type A, a New York artist collective contributing a piece for the IMA’s new Virginia B. Fairbanks Art&Nature Park.

Yet ArtBabble feels far from Indianapolis-centric.

“I think the museum has struck the right tone,” said Art21’s Miller. “You don’t get the sense that it’s an IMA project. It feels like a cooperative governorship — that everybody has a stake in this.”