The mystery of Artdish

The oldest online visual art publication in the Northwest is Artdish, a forum for essays, reviews and DYI commentary through its forum. At its heart is a mystery. Why does it take so little advantage of what being online has to offer? It is link-free and nearly image free. Reviews appear with one small picture, if that.

The answer lies in its age. The site is jerry-rigged from an outmoded system that is falling further and further behind, even though reviews are currently supported with a 4Culture grant.

Jim Demetre is responsible for the site’s content. In response to an email, he generously provided me with the following:

Artdish is run by Eric Gould and myself. Eric is the web developer and I am responsible for the content. I have known him for sixteen years (we met at the Reflex office in Pioneer Square) and I consider him to be one of my very best friends.
Eric built the site ten years ago for Victoria Josslin and has been responsible for maintaining it ever since.

Neither of us receive compensation for our efforts and Eric has worked full time at Microsoft and elsewhere through most of this decade, so his ability to spend time on the project has been limited.

At this point I feel we need to make large-scale changes to Artdish to improve its functionality and take better advantage of the aesthetic potential of the web today.
There is currently no search function for the entire site and it is very difficult for writers to post their reviews on the homepage, let alone add multiple images or video.

Artdish is so structurally fragmented I think it would be best to simply start over and build a new site with an already existing, easy-to-use blog engine while archiving the all the existing content on a searchable database. What we have been doing instead is making slight and ineffective modifications to what is outdated or was poorly-conceived from the start.

My fear is that these problems have relegated us to the sidelines while other art websites have flourished in the public arena. When our forum page was very active a few years ago (I have over 2,500 posts there), the system should have been replaced with a more current version and moved to the less frequently updated homepage, where we were posting longer reviews. But the change was never made and we’re still using the old version from 1999.

Five years ago I had ambitions of transforming our now-shelved ‘community’ pages (with links to galleries and artists) into a modest social networking platform that could link artist pages with gallery pages and content from across the web. Today I’m just focusing on publishing reviews and holding out hope that we can create a site that lives up to basic 2010 expectations.

The real mystery of Artdish is that Demetre and Gould have run it for a decade without compensation. A big thanks to 4Culture for recognizing that cultural commentary cannot float in the air like a hair or a feather but needs support. (Unfortunately, thanks to state budget cuts that grind on and on, 4Culture itself needs support. Joey Veltkamp story here.)