We live in a visual culture, where people communicate through images from emoji to selfies to fine art and NFTs. In this environment, memes have become a common means of communication, entertainment form, and snarky millennial exchange fueled by the early twenty-first-century online social media explosion. Most famously in the last year, Tesla founder Elon Musk announced to his over fifty-seven million followers on Twitter that “who controls the memes controls the universe.”1 He has also referred to memes as “modern art,” which one can assume was intended to illustrate the creative, boundary-breaching nature of the virtual media form (fig. 1).2 However, Musk’s assertion belies the quotidian, real-time, fleeting nature of the highly accessible and emotionally impactful visual form by equating it to the elite, timeless historical category of modern art, which itself is wrought from the problematics of modernism.
As images have come to replace...
University of California Press