When Memes Meet Modern Art
- mariacharame
- Sep 3
- 5 min read
Scrolling through a feed often feels like entering an endless stream of disposable images: jokes, gifs, viral trends that flare up for a moment before sinking into obscurity. At first glance, memes seem to belong to this ephemeral realm of digital clutter fragments of humor designed to entertain and then vanish. Yet if we pause, the resemblance to modern and contemporary art becomes difficult to ignore. Like the avant-garde gestures of the twentieth century, memes thrive on disruption, irreverence, and mass accessibility. They refuse elitist gatekeeping, circulate outside institutional channels, and operate as visual commentary on politics, culture, and everyday life. Where a gallery exhibition may take months or years to prepare, a meme emerges overnight, carrying the same capacity to shock, provoke, or inspire recognition. The comparison may sound playful, but it points to something profound: memes function as a kind of grassroots avant-garde, one that speaks in pixels rather than paint.
The very notion of a meme aligns with the art historical impulse to democratize culture. Just as Pop Art in the 1960s turned to soup cans and comic strips to collapse the distinction between “high” and “low,” memes are born from the textures of everyday life: screenshots of text messages, awkward photographs, snippets of popular culture. Andy Warhol famously declared that “art is what you can get away with.” The meme extends this philosophy, testing the limits of what counts as meaningful expression. Where Warhol elevated the Coca-Cola bottle into an object of contemplation, the internet elevates the distracted boyfriend into a vessel for infinite narratives. Both operate on the same principle: the banal, once reframed, becomes commentary.
Humor is central to this process. Marcel Duchamp knew this in 1917 when he submitted a urinal to an exhibition under the pseudonym “R. Mutt.” His Fountain was dismissed as a prank, but the joke carried the weight of a manifesto: art is not defined by craft, but by context and intention. Memes inherit this legacy of irreverence. The absurdity of inserting Shrek into Renaissance paintings, or looping a short video into endless surreal juxtapositions, is not just entertainment; it is a critique by way of nonsense. Humor destabilizes the seriousness with which culture often cloaks itself. In this sense, memes and avant-garde art both reveal how laughter can be a radical tool, exposing contradictions and shaking institutional authority.
This subversive potential becomes especially clear in the political realm. Historically, art has always provided a mirror to power from the biting caricatures of Goya to the protest-driven performances of the 1970s. Today, memes often outpace traditional media in shaping political discourse. During the 2021 U.S. presidential inauguration, the image of Bernie Sanders sitting with mittens went viral within hours. It was re-captioned thousands of times, appearing on landscapes, paintings, album covers, and video games. What looked like a harmless joke in fact condensed a global mood of political fatigue, alienation, and dark humor in the face of crisis. Unlike a gallery installation that requires time, funding, and institutional validation, the meme spread freely, reaching millions without mediation. Its effectiveness lay not only in its wit but in its speed: memes don’t just comment on politics; they shape how politics is felt.
This immediacy also highlights the paradoxical temporality of memes. They live fast and die young, saturating feeds one week and disappearing the next. Their ephemerality often leads to their dismissal as insignificant, yet this short lifespan mirrors the fate of many avant-garde movements. Dada, Fluxus, Situationism all burned bright and brief, deliberately rejecting longevity. Their manifestos often announced the “death” of art, even as they reinvented its possibilities. Memes, too, embody this rhythm. They are born from cultural anxieties, explode across networks, and vanish once the joke is exhausted. Their disappearance is not failure but fulfillment: the very point of a meme is to live in the moment, to reflect a now that cannot be preserved.
The question, then, is whether memes can be considered art in their own right. Critics might argue that their disposability disqualifies them. But disposability has always been a part of art. Performance art, for instance, often leaves behind no trace beyond memory and documentation. Street art and graffiti are erased almost as soon as they appear, yet their cultural significance is undeniable. In fact, the lack of permanence can intensify meaning, charging the act with urgency. Memes share this condition. They are artworks without an archive, creations destined to vanish, and yet they capture the emotional pulse of a generation. To understand memes is to recognize that cultural relevance does not always require longevity.
Equally important is the question of authorship. Modern art challenged the romantic ideal of the solitary genius; memes dismantle it entirely. A single image circulates through countless variations, each remix erasing the original creator. In this sense, memes are the most collaborative form of visual culture we have ever seen. They are a digital folk art, authored by no one and everyone, embodying what Walter Benjamin once called “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” If Benjamin worried that mechanical copies would erode the aura of art, memes prove that aura can be remade collectively. Their power lies precisely in the fact that no one owns them; they belong to the culture that circulates them.
To dismiss memes as trivial is therefore to misunderstand both their reach and their resonance. They are not marginal noise in the cultural system but its very language, a lingua franca of irony, humor, and critique. Just as Duchamp’s urinal was once considered vulgar and nonsensical, today’s memes may one day be archived and studied as artifacts of digital modernity.
In their capacity to democratize expression, collapse hierarchies, and respond with unprecedented speed to the crises of the present, memes stand as the unruly heirs of modern art. They are reminders that art has never been about stability, but about disruption and the internet has simply amplified that disruption to global scale.
If modern art once sought to scandalize, provoke, and break free from the confines of tradition, memes are doing the same, only in a different medium. They reveal how humor can function as critique, how ephemerality can carry weight, and how collective authorship can challenge institutional hierarchies. They may not hang in museums, at least not yet, but they circulate where culture is most alive: in the unstable, restless space of the feed. To take memes seriously is to take seriously the ways we communicate, protest, and laugh in a digital age. And in that sense, the line between memes and modern art is not just blurred; it may no longer exist.
Stay tuned as in the second part, we will move from theory to examples, exploring artworks that have themselves become memes, from the Mona Lisa’s endless reinventions to Vermeer’s masked Girl with a Pearl Earring, and what their transformations reveal about the afterlife of art in the internet age.
Sources / Bibliography:
Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in digital culture. MIT press.
Coverage of Bernie Sanders’ inauguration meme: The New York Times (Jan 2021), The Guardian (Jan 2021).
Barrett, E. (2004). What does it meme? The exegesis as valorisation and validation of creative arts research. Text, 8(Special 3), 1-6.
https://www.guarcholga.es/memes-and-aesthetics-the-evolution-of-digital-art-in-popular-culture/
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