We put the name back on the picture
webartmedia is a collection of art that went viral on the internet, and a small desk reporting on what happens around it. Two halves of the same job: keep the work, keep the credit.
Most of the art you see in a day arrives with no name on it. It was screenshotted, re-uploaded, cropped into a grid, or recorded off someone else's screen — and somewhere in that chain, the person who made it stopped being part of the picture.
We do three things about that.
We collect. Every work in the collection carries the same credit slip: artist, handle, the platform it first appeared on, the day it broke, and how far it went. It's the same information a wall label carries in a gallery, applied to work that never gets one — a hand-coiled pot and a reaction image get the identical treatment, because the internet gives them the identical treatment.
That means cartoons and memes are not a sideshow here. They travel further than anything else on the internet and they lose their authors faster than anything else, which makes them the clearest case for the whole project. Where a work is a remix, the slip names both the person who built the format and the person who made the version that spread.
We interview. Not while the wave is cresting — after. We want to know how the thing was actually made, what the week did to them, and whether any of it turned into money.
We report. The media desk covers the machinery: how a picture spreads, where attribution falls off, what a viral week pays, and what artists have open in the other tab.
The rules we hold ourselves to
- We ask before we publish No work goes in the collection without the artist's permission, or a licence that plainly allows it. If we can't reach someone, we don't run it.
- We link to the source, not the repost Every entry points at the artist's own account. If the version that spread was someone else's re-upload, we say so.
- A remix has two authors Cartoons and memes are most of what goes around, and most of it is built on somebody else's format. We credit the person who made the template and the person who made the version that spread. If we can only find one of them, we say which one is missing.
- Artists can pull their work Email us and it comes down. No conditions, no negotiation, no request for a reason.
- We correct in public Wrong credits get fixed on the page with a dated note, not silently edited away.
- We don't run work as a mystery “Artist unknown” is not a caption, it's an unfinished job. If we can't find who made it, it waits in the drafts until we can.
Reach the desk
The fastest route for anything to do with a specific work is the submit page — it goes straight to whoever is editing that week.
For everything else: desk@webartmedia.com. Press and partnerships: press@webartmedia.com.
We answer credit corrections first, every time, before anything else in the inbox.
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What went around this week, who actually made it, and one thing worth reading.
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