Credit

[haptalaon]

Sometimes, I feel bad* about having lots of other people's artwork on my website; but then I go onto tumblr or pinterest and crikey, it's just so normalised for decontextualised art to be shared around over and over. I actively avoid both sites when I'm image-hunting because it's too hard to find out who made the images - and if you find an uncredited picture on my site, 9/10 it's because it was on tumblr or pinterest originally and it's just too hard to reconstruct its original source even with a reverse image search

*(I don't feel bad; I feel pre-emptively frightened of being yelled at, which is not the same thing. I am frequently unwell and at such times, I like to participate in the contemporary hobby of image curation, and as I am putting time into it I want my collages to be permanent, rather than ephemeral labour that creates value for a platform.)

(what society needs is to normalise permanent metadata for all image formats and for all websites to preserve and display it; when I download a picture from tumblr, it should have the artist's name and website hard-coded. As it stands, I type in the artist's name and the platform the artist was on - 'picasso tumblr' - if it's a pseudonym. My website gallery will display metadata, so I am slowly adding both artist-name metadata and an image description to everything I've got uploaded, but it's an endless process)