Art Memes: How the Message Satirizes the Medium
Art meets art criticism in the Duchampian digital space.
An online meme can be many things in 2022, but one of its primary and most prevalent forms remains the image macro, a traditional format featuring a captioned picture, often used to express a feeling or reaction. There are evolutions and trends, discontinuations and moments when certain memes come into popularity or fade into obscurity. They’re pervasive in our daily Internet usage, filling up our newsfeeds and eyeline during hours of doomscrolling. You’ll have your favorites, and some that won’t speak to you. For me, when the words are capitalized, written in a bold white Impact font and outlined in black, it’s particularly old-school. I felt a pang of nostalgia when I saw one appear in The African Desperate, a new, irony-heavy critique of the MFA experience from multimedia artist Martine Syms. This particular meme, dubbed “Matrix Morpheus,” borrows a still from the popular turn-of-the-millenium cyberpunk film franchise to illustrate “a revelation that often belittles futile or petty behavior,” according to standardized meme dictionaries. “WHAT IF I TOLD YOU,” reads the first part of the Syms’ two-line format, “THERE ARE BLACK THEORISTS.” The words create a frame at the top and bottom of Laurence Fishburne’s face; his gaze impassable behind a tiny, round pair of reflective sunglasses.
Syms’ choice to include the image here (in response to a side character’s casually racist remark) is far from incidental. In the years following an initial period involving stick figures and stock characters, the meme has evolved into a powerfully contemporary critical tool—especially within the privilege-driven, frequently alienating context of the art world. Whether it’s an image macro, a video clip, or turn of phrase, the meme plays by no one’s rules—and certainly not the establishment’s. There’s plenty of marketing department TikTok propaganda, of course, but the good stuff is organically formed: funny and subversive, often contextually inappropriate and anti-aesthetic simply by nature.
"Whether it’s an image macro, a video clip, or turn of phrase, the meme plays by no one’s rules— certainly not the establishments."
Take, for instance, a recent post from The White Pube, a tongue-in-cheek arts collaboration between a pair of UK- based critics. The caption, written in lowercase on the white space above a square image, reads: “art students packing up their studios after the degree show ready to enter the art industry (before they realize it’s racist, ableist, no one good makes any money & everyone’s burnt out).” The picture below is a frame from AMC’s classic midcentury-period workplace drama Mad Men, featuring Elisabeth Moss as spunky copywriter Peggy Olson. With her smooth bob and a slim cigarette between her lips, she looks impossibly chic sauntering down an office hallway in dark sunglasses, holding a moving box full of her desk contents and a picture frame tucked under her arm. The conflict between the composed vibe of the image and the desperate tone of the caption perfectly captures the tension between the aestheticised ideal and crushing reality of the art world. Dissonance is well characterized by Internet humor because online spaces have allowed for the juxtaposition of knowledge and access to references in a way no other medium has. Through their crude, easily reconstructible comedy, memes have become the near-universal language of our shared experience.
“The meme is like a melody,” says Mitch Anzuoni, advisor and head of research at the Bard Memetics Laboratory, a dedicated space for examining memes, online media, and content dissemination. “But instead of needing years of deliberate and dedicated practice on an instrument to be able to play others’ melodies, and make your own, you just need to be alive and online.” The access-for-all basis is especially pertinent in an industry like the arts, where information is often manipulated or withheld to preserve a certain status quo. But the meme is a form of criticism that benefits from the online disinhibition effect: the idea that users exercise less restraint in their communications online than they would in person. Social media has been a game-changer in connecting and platforming marginalized artists and art workers—and the anonymity it affords in some cases is invaluable. Art memes feel their most effective and incisive when they attempt to speak truth to power, and succeed in attracting an audience; the likes, comments, and other positive affirmations form a positive feedback loop for their creators, incentivizing their further production, and bolstering the communities that congregate around the jokes.
The problems inherent to the art world are nothing if not complex, but the ‘pale, male, and stale’ root causes have never been clearer. “I don’t think of the arts as elitist,” says Sean Tatol of The Manhattan Art Review. “It’s just classist. Elitism would imply you have to know something about art to succeed, but rich people who don’t know anything about art often do quite well.” The 33-year-old critic began his project—a mix of comics, written reviews, and radio shows—in late 2019. “I do get the vague sense that criticism feels more broadly relevant than when I started,” says Tatol, “but that hasn’t changed anything.” His newsletter made the leap to social media at the behest of his peers, but he acknowledges he doesn’t really “think of Instagram as a medium.”
The question of whether memes can be considered art, and social media platforms as mediums, is undoubtedly a controversial one—and its answer is still evolving. Memes have been (and still can be) ugly, slapdash, and uninventive; but as they proliferate, are becoming increasingly stylized, curated for quality, and produced with a rising threshold of graphic design skill. These days, if you want something to be maximally shareable online, it should probably look at least a little bit nice. But even memes that have been ‘deep fried,’ or put through a series of filters to an extreme, tomato-red point of oversaturation, have an undeniable anti-aesthetic aesthetic appeal. It’s also something that tends to do well on a platform like Instagram, where a current trend (there and across social media in general) is to reject the aesthetic perfection more traditionally associated with the platform.
Cem A., an artist and curator based in Germany, is more optimistic about memes’ power. “It’s hard to quantify change in the art world,” he says. “On one hand, I can see the public opinion is shifting. People are becoming more responsive to increasing precarity in the art world. Events such as the unionization efforts in the US and the increasing popularity of politically engaged artists are giving me hope for tangible change in the near future. On the other hand, the art world structures that enable precarious working conditions continue to operate.” Cem’s meme page Freeze Magazine keeps a trained eye on these ongoing issues, discussing everything from the debt and depression that plague art school graduates to the inevitable microplastics poisoning the artists of the so-called ‘selfie generation.’ Of course, some problems are easier to laugh off than others. Certain memes are clearly a catharsis for truisms about the art world that feel frustratingly immutable: a recent post shows a cyclical flow chart that begins with “create a hostile environment,” moves to “make allegations in bad faith,” and “perpetuate racism and violence,” skipping over “engage in a nuanced conversation” to loop back around to the beginning. “The strength of memes comes from their ability to amplify critical opinions,” says Cem A. But “they are more like a vehicle.”
Many have argued for memes’ status as transformative art, a category that includes fan fiction, collage, mosaics, and more. Meme art poses a crisis of value within a market that sees an NFT (in this case, of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first- ever tweet) selling for nearly $3 million one year and not even $1,000 the next. But ascertaining the aesthetic and financial value of a piece has always been a subjective, controversial process. The embrace of a volatile, environmentally harmful cryptocurrency by the art world’s major players certainly can’t have helped matters, but here is a specious air of accessibility to these metaversal spaces, and so NFT memes lack a certain integrity, art or not.
"These days, if you want something to be maximally shareable online, it should probably look at least a little bit nice."
If not art, then memes most definitely are a new age of criticism. Either poking fun at the industry, or at the concept of art in general, art criticism has no doubt been invigorated. It joins a long tradition of masters who, at their practice’s inception, may have also been trying to take the piss. Consider Marcel Duchamp’s infamous “Fountain”, an artwork widely seen as the start of the contemporary movement. “Fountain” consists of an upturned white urinal signed and dated by Duchamp’s artistic pseudonym R. Mutt. Just like an art meme, it’s a work that was established through its transformation. “Fountain” was likely received as a practical joke by its anonymous submission to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon, where it was rejected on the grounds that it was “indecent,” could be considered plagiarism, and because the society’s board (from which Duchamp later resigned) had deemed it “not art.”
In the same vein as work by The White Pube or Freeze Magazine, Duchamp intended “Fountain” as a comment on the norms of the time. Like all good memes, “Fountain” transcended the original limits of its form and context, and went on to prompt a conversation that is still being held today. In blurring the boundaries between creation and criticism, art memes prove themselves worthy of serious artistic consideration, providing an adaptable tool that is accessible with just a username and password. That being said, it might be worth investing in the Adobe Creative Cloud, too.
