How We Verify Art
Street art moves, gets painted over and gets torn down, and the same photo often travels the internet with the wrong artist, city or year attached. This page explains how we check what we publish, especially in our Artwork Files, where every fact links to its source.
What we try to confirm
For each artwork: who made it, its title (if it has one), where it is, when it was made, what it is made of, who commissioned it or which festival it belongs to, and whether it is still there.
Where the facts come from
- The artist and the people behind the work: the artist’s own site, posts and videos, the festival or commissioner.
- Local press, in the local language: the paper in the town where the work is usually knows more than international art blogs.
- Official records: planning applications, permits, council minutes, demolition notices.
- Dated pictures: photos with a known date, dated Street View panoramas and archived satellite imagery.
- Archived copies: for news pages we also link a saved copy, so the source survives paywalls and dead links.
Three sources or no file
We make an Artwork File only when at least three independent sources confirm this specific work. When the sources are too thin, we hold the work back instead of publishing a guess. Before a file goes live, every claim is checked again against the source it links to.
How we describe certainty
Each fact in a file carries one of four labels:
- Checked: supported by the sources listed with it.
- Reported: repeated by credible sources but not independently confirmed.
- Unconfirmed: useful context exists, but a key detail remains uncertain.
- Conflicting: reliable sources disagree, so we show both sides and say which one we lean towards and why.
When an official record and a festival page disagree (an address, say), the record usually wins, and we say so.
Is it still there?
Every file has a status stamp:
- Standing: a dated source shows the work in place. We never write “still there” without one.
- Seen: the newest dated sighting we could find, with its date.
- Gone: painted over, removed or demolished, with the year and the source that shows it.
A camera date is labelled as a camera date, not as the day the work was made. At the bottom of each file, “Last checked” tells you when we last looked.
Photos, quotes and credits
We credit photographers whenever we know who took the photo. The artist’s own photos and videos are shown through their own embeds (Flickr, YouTube and so on), so they stay theirs. We don’t publish screenshots of news articles; instead we quote a short line in the original language with an English translation, the date and a link.
Corrections and tips
We correct clear errors and prefer saying what we could not verify over guessing.