Art and the Internet

It bothers me how art loses its provenance on the internet. Somebody finds something cool and, say, sticks it on their tumbler. Then somebody else reposts it, and somebody pins it to a board on pinterest. Etc, etc. If none of them include the original source, you really have to dig in and do some research as to where the piece came from. Google image search, tineye, etc.

I WANT to know who the artist is. Sure, I appreciate pretty art on its own for its own sake. But if an artist did something I like I want to see more of their stuff, not just get linked back to the last blog to have grabbed the piece.

When I find a piece of art I want to use for my short fictions, I try to figure out where it came from. I just spent a good long while doing that with a piece, only to find that the original artist had taken it down from their deviantart account some time ago. Luckily for me, it looks like deviantart still had a cached version of it that you could link to. Even if that hadn’t been there I was still going to credit that person as the artist and give a link to their deviantart page. Because that’s where it came from, and artists deserve to have their name attached to their art.


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