You spend hours a week on camera in front of the same three feet of wall, and most people furnish it by accident. A shelf that was already there. A framed thing from a previous apartment. Nothing, which somehow reads as the loudest option of all.
It's worth treating as a design problem, because a webcam is a strange and unflattering instrument and the rules are not the same as the rules for a room.
The camera flattens everything
A webcam has a small sensor, a wide lens, and aggressive automatic exposure. What it does to a wall is compress it: less tonal range, less contrast between similar values, and almost no sense of depth beyond the plane of your face.
The practical consequence is that flat art tends to vanish. A print with fine detail and mid-tone colors, which looks perfectly good in the room, resolves on camera into a vague rectangle. Whatever made it interesting was operating at a scale the compression throws away.
Things that survive the flattening have physical relief, strong value contrast, or a shape distinct enough to register at low resolution. Depth is the most reliable of the three, because actual shadow produces contrast the camera cannot compress away. It's real light behaving, not detail that gets averaged out.
I'll declare the bias: I make dimensional relief sculptures, so I would say this. But the reason is testable in about a minute. Point your camera at a framed print and then at anything with real depth, a shadow box, a textured object, a plant. The difference isn't subtle.
Scale, and why yours is probably too small
The single most common mistake is a piece sized for the wall rather than for the frame.
Your camera crops hard. Depending on the lens and how close you sit, the visible background might be four or five feet across, with your head occupying the middle of it. A 16 by 20 piece hung at a sensible height for a room can end up as a small rectangle floating near the top edge of the shot, or cropped in half.
Two things help. Go larger than feels necessary, and hang lower than you would for a room, because the camera is at seated eye level rather than standing.
The other option is a horizontal format, which suits the crop far better than a portrait one. A panoramic panel sits inside the frame the way a normal piece doesn't. That's not incidental to my sizes: the 20 by 8 and 30 by 12 formats exist because a wide, shallow rectangle is the shape a lot of walls and most cameras actually want.
Glass is the enemy
Glazed art on a video call is a bad idea, and it's the mistake I see most.
A ring light, a window, or an overhead fixture reflects off glass straight into the lens, and the piece becomes a bright shape with something vaguely behind it. Matte acrylic helps. No glazing at all is better.
Anything unframed and unglazed, which includes most relief work, sidesteps the problem entirely. It also avoids the second issue with glass, which is that it flattens the depth you were relying on in the first place.
Light it from the side
The same principle that makes relief work in a room makes it work on camera, and it's about angle rather than brightness.
A downlight directly above a piece collapses its shadows straight down and flattens it. Light raking across it from one side, at something like forty five degrees, brings the depth back. One inexpensive clip light aimed from the side will do more for your background than any amount of overhead lighting.
Keep it dimmer than the light on your face. A background brighter than you are makes the camera expose for the wall and leave you in silhouette, which is the opposite of the goal. I've written more about lighting work at home, and most of it applies here with the brightness turned down.
What it says, which is the actual question
Everything visible behind you is doing communication work whether you chose it or not. Bookshelves say one thing, awards say another, a blank wall says you either moved recently or would rather not be perceived.
The useful test is whether the object gives someone a way into a conversation without demanding one. A piece with visible process does this well, because the obvious question is how it was made, and the answer is interesting. That's a better dynamic than a piece whose only available comment is that it's nice.
What I'd avoid is anything that reads as a credential. The wall behind you is not a resume, and treating it as one is legible instantly.
A short version
Bigger than you think, hung lower than you think, wide rather than tall, unglazed, and lit from the side at a lower brightness than your face. Then something with actual depth to it, because depth is the only quality on this list that a webcam cannot take away from you.
If you want to know what that looks like in practice, the current work is here, and this piece covers what relief does under changing light once you're back in the room with it.
Shawn Kemp makes one-of-a-kind generative artworks fabricated as dimensional layered relief sculptures in Bellingham, Washington.