towerofsleep:

dailymeh:

In a hundred years, will art historians consider animated gifs to be a legitimate and important movement in 21st century art? Or, at any rate, will they acknowledge something from the memeified internet? Computer and internet-based art is the opposite of gallery art, and the art world is slow to recognize it because it only works in context, and would become meaningless or stupid if put into a gallery, and if it can’t be put into a gallery at least in principle, the art world has trouble understanding it. Surfing a blog that keeps up with local art shows and happenings, I noticed one that happened this week: it was called “Count the dicks” and held in a gallery, and it involved Chatroulette. This perfectly illustrates the way the art world approaches the internet: too little, too late, and out of the proper context. What were these people doing in a gallery that wasn’t done one year ago at some random dude’s Chatroulette party? Do anonymous dicks on webcam become more meaningful when they’re approached as traditional art? I don’t think so. I think they become less meaningful.

Eric Gelber writes about the image chat dump.fm:

The very act of posting on dump.fm calls into question the burdensome concept of the unique object. One and all welcome borrowing/stealing and celebrate the creative impulse in a fairly pure form. Taking someone else’s post and making something of it is the ultimate compliment. Long time users could probably point out the origins of some image that has been turned into an evolving meme through time, but new users will have no idea where or when or even how the animated gifs and collaged and tweaked digital images were made.

The art world is obsessed with the fetishized object, the one that can be critiqued, dissected, exhibited and, most importantly, sold. When artists want to rebel against the commodified object, they turn to non-objects, like performances, or they create temporary objects that disintegrate and lose their value over time. I’d argue that animated gifs and internet memes in general are more important and interesting challenges to the fetishized object, because they’re so very like objects — films, photographs, paintings, sculptures, installations — but also so clearly not objects to be bought and sold or exhibited in galleries.

A meme is, almost by definition, created by a collective of anonymous and pseudonymous people, and they live and die by a sort of intellectual Darwinism in which ideas either go extinct or get streamlined until the temptation to share them, inject them into conversations, modify and tweak them becomes almost irresistible. By their nature, they’re flashes in the pan: if they’re successful at all, they spread so quickly and tirelessly that we become overexposed to them, and so they die. When Richard Dawkins proposed memes as a cultural analog to genes in 1976, the idea seemed far-fetched and overbroad. Not until the rise of the internet could we actually observe the lifecycle of a meme directly, and it now seems silly to deny the insights to be gleaned from this analogy, although “memetics” is far from a respectable and reliable field of study. Getting back to memes as art, their context is so different from gallery art that it seems silly to discuss the two in the same breath. I mean, come on, they’re just for the lulz, right? To discuss them as if they were anything else seems to miss the point, but of course, not every meme is funny or entirely for fun, and besides, there’s always going to be people who want to dissect jokes, knowing full well they’ll destroy them in so doing.

If we choose to view memes as art, even if just for the sake of argument — there’s the risk here that we’ll turn into analytic zombies who can’t shut down the intellectual machinery long enough to enjoy the stuff for what it is, the way an extended visit to TvTropes can, at least for a time, destroy our enjoyment of fiction — I think we’ll find that they’re pretty much the ideal, non-commercial, social kind that curators and critics dream of, but that traditional artists never seem to actually pull off. An image macro, a YouTube video, an animated gif, or a simple text-based meme like 100 pushups isn’t created for profit, it isn’t created by just one person (or, at any rate, its memeification isn’t), and a lot of the time it wasn’t created with the intent of becoming a meme at all. No one holds ownership of it. It doesn’t exist to promote anything. It can’t be bought or sold. It is more than the sum of its many instantiations, something purer, more cerebral than the most high-strung of conceptual art. Yes, I said it: I think lolcats are (in a sense) more cerebral than, say, One and Three Chairs, and I love that work. Because a meme is an idea, not a concrete object, it is in a sense conceptualism taken to its logical extreme: there is only the concept, nothing more.

It would seem that a consensus is emerging.