ARTDOXA

» see artdoxa.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ARTDOXA called itself the community for contemporary art, artists and audience, and for sixteen years that is what it ran as. Painters and photographers put work up, tagged it, argued about it in the forum, and marked each other's pieces as favorites. Collectors and curators had accounts too. It was German, built in Rails by a company called ARTDOXA GmbH, and it ran in English for a membership that was not.

The ranking mechanism was the part worth remembering. The front page carried something called Members' Favorite of the Day, and under it the artwork with the highest score of favorites over the previous fifty days, with a hard rule of one piece per artist in that window. You could not sit on the front page by flooding it. The result was a homepage that changed slowly and showed you fifty different people over two months rather than the same four.

Contemporary art communities are a category I read about rather than belong to, and a German-run one with a largely European membership was not going to reach me in Ankara at any point. The thing that pulled me in is the shape of the ending, which the site wrote out itself in plain sentences on its last live day.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it cost to stay up ~

Here is the farewell, in their words, posted on the homepage where the featured artwork normally sat. ARTDOXA has been for sale for some time, as you have seen. The maintenance and ongoing development to keep our non-profit and idealistic platform for contemporary art running and safe from hackers etc. costs money that is no longer there. Because of small investments that are necessary now and the running costs, we will have to shut down with a heavy heart at the beginning of summer on June 21.

Read that back slowly, because it contains the entire economics of a certain kind of website. Nothing about traffic. Nothing about users leaving. The platform was idealistic and non-profit, which here means it had no revenue, and after sixteen years the person or people funding it had reached the end of what they could fund. The line about staying safe from hackers is doing real work too: a Rails application from 2007 does not maintain itself, and somebody was paying to keep it patched.

~ the last day ~

The crawler caught the whole transition. At 01:56 UTC on 21 June 2023 the homepage was still the full site, eight kilobytes of featured artwork and member activity. By 16:45 the same day it was 956 bytes: the ARTDOXA wordmark in black on white, with one line of text underneath it. "says thank you for your participation and sympathy."

That page stayed up for months after, then shrank to a server error. These days artdoxa.com answers with a bare 503 from a web server that is still running somewhere with nothing left behind it.

~ what went with it ~

Sixteen years of uploaded work by people who were, in most cases, not famous. Some of them will have the files. Many will not, because the whole point of a platform like this is that it holds your portfolio so you do not have to, and that bargain only stays honest while somebody keeps paying the bill.

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