As long as I can go back later with a script and upgrade the old to the new, should the necessity of having more than fifty-two fetish describing characters, it should work out pretty well.

I admit: I didn’t go into as much detail as I’d like.
Perhaps we should think of it as “blo.gs does art”, if I can go as far as having a basic login system for users to choose who or what to follow.

On another thought: I’m not so sure spammers bother with pinging a system that lets someone know that ‘Hello, my site is updated.’ as much as they like to comment-spam-bomb weblogs, in general.
Perhaps a system could be put in place:
When you register your art place, you will be required to give a valid email address, where we will send you a small snippet of code to be placed in your page that we will look for (Technorati/BlogShares style).
Once this is successfully done, your first two pings will require that you click a verification link in an email.

Or something. I’m ill, and I’m not thinking completely.

That being said, a mechanism like the one you describe is too easy to abuse (by spammers), and not selective enough, either. I’m pretty sure that most people would soon cry out for more flexibility with regard to what appears and what not - for example, the ability to limit things to certain artists only and the like. Not to mention that many people are (basically) interested in more than one category, anyway.

Overall, it seems like a much better idea to just get RSS feeds for each artist’s account on sites like VCL, SA etc. that update as new art is posted there - that would allow some much more fine-grained control over what you want to see and what you don’t want to see (”don’t want to see” as in “it takes up too much space and I’m just skipping over it, anyway”, not “I actively dislike this and am offended by it”).

What you describe *sounds* like a good idea, and I’d be happy to try it out, but if you ever tried keeping up with the entire VCL’s new art postings, for example, well, you know what I mean.