LACDA: It’s a toss-up

I assume you’re here because you’ve heard of LACDA, the LA Center for Digital Art. Perhaps you’ve seen one of their open calls. I’ve entered a few of their competitions myself and I too was curious about their reputation. There are articles out there claiming that LACDA is a scam. These are followed by comments claiming that it’s not. These are followed by more comments implying that all open calls are scams. What to believe? Well, I’m here to say that I don’t think LACDA is a scam. I don’t throw that word around lightly. I think LACDA is a gallery that’s taken advantage of the fact that their medium – digital – has global reach and is easily transmittable. That’s something that I’m sure a few sculpture galleries are envious of.

I’ve never seen the actual gallery, so I can’t comment on its location, popularity, etc. But I was part of their featured artist program. The one thing that irked me is that this program was promoted as having a number of benefits and the #1 selling point for me was that it would drive more visitors to my art website. A little while after being listed on their website, I noticed that Google was not picking up my listing on their website. I won’t get too technical here, but Google ranks websites higher if they’re linked on other websites. The link on LACDA’s website was generated with JavaScript. That means that Google couldn’t read it and therefore drive more traffic to my website. I kindly contacted the owner of LACDA, asking if he could make this fix to his website, since it was the top reason for me joining the program. He said he would. I asked again a month later when I saw that it hadn’t been done. He said he would. A month later, I asked again. No response. I don’t understand why a 5-minute change would elicit such a blow-off.

So that’s my take on LACDA. Maybe I got some exposure from it, maybe not. But my main reason for being a part of it – more traffic to my art website – has not panned out. All over something that would’ve taken 5 minutes to fix.

One thought on “LACDA: It’s a toss-up”

  1. Hi,

    It’s Rex from LACDA. I saw this and thought I would reply. The issue is that I use outside software (memberthingy its called of all things, the guy that runs the company is very sweet), which has enabled us to have memberships and represent artists this way. Anyway, this is not a 5 minute fix for me, as I don’t even have access to the program to rewrite it, and my inquiries to the company about it came back with the answer that the rewrite was not really possible. So… someday that would be great if we could fix that, I suppose we will recode the whole site eventually so we can take more control. I’m paying thousands to an outside consultant to SEO key pages (search engine optimize) of the site just this week and redid some of the code yesterday and today. A work in progress.. lots more to go I’m afraid, this is a demanding place!

    Thanks,

    R

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