In a time when likes, reblogs, and favorites determine what gets seen and what doesn’t, all cultural products, movies, music, writing, and visual art alike, exist in an economy of attention. Instead of critical regard or placement in the right magazines, the most obvious metric of a piece of art’s success is how many eyeballs it attracts and how quickly it gets spread on the internet.

This economy of attention can be a great thing in that artists have the hope of reaching a wider audience than ever, but it also comes with certain creative conflicts. Should work be designed to go viral, in the same way that the Old Spice Guy campaign was crafted to be a YouTube sensation? Has a work failed if it fails to go viral?

Artists working online are forced to confront this attention economy and are responding to it in different ways. There’s a separation to be made between artwork that is created to go viral and art that responds to the conditions created by virality and the communication stru