Brilliant idea, I've never been very far below the surface of Reddit. I'm a big fan of the @newsycombinator twitter account for mobile reading -- do you know if there's a way of making something similar for the reddit subgroup?
I think I should correct myself -- when I say that I want to create a clone news community "for art", I really meant "for artists".
On hacker news, you don't see a lot of articles called "Look at this awesome new app!" -- instead you see stuff about the guys who made this "awesome app" and all the successes and failures that they've overcome.
As an artist, there comes a time where you don't want to look at other people's "awesome new art". You want to read about what drives them, or how they got started (and in the process learn about their awesome new art). I want to read about what's going on in the art market, and what people are predicting for the future of art. I want to read articles from the curator's perspective, from the collectors' perspective, the viewer's perspective.
I think the best way to get this is a non-visual system user-driven aggregation system like HN. Y'all have an awesome community of smart people submitting compelling articles... I'm simply jealous.
Do you know why they die out so quickly? Is it just because they didn't generate enough interest? It doesn't seem like it'd be costly or time-intensive to maintain.
Text is still the best way of discussing ideas, even among artists. My concern is that a similar service won't get any where near the critical mass in terms of its user-base... which may be because we're more visual ;)
http://www.calendarzone.org/calendar/2012-calendar-10.jpg