Classical Art Memes Spell A New Relationship With Paintings
Gone Are The Days Of Reverential Awe
Far from demanding reverence, digital productions allow people to play with images and make them comical; a whole internet sub-culture exists of those who caption art thus transforming it. This interaction is not inherently good or bad, but it will certainly change how people respond to art when they are confronted with the originals. Some now visit gallery’s and caption in their heads; art illicit’s a smile instead of reverential awe.
I see this in myself. When I recently visited a gallery, instead of viewing with a historical or technical eye, the facial expressions and body positions conjured memes to mind and I took photos for friends and captioned them in this spirit. John Berger discusses this in seminal work Ways Of Seeing and explores how music and text can influence our perception of arts meaning; opera can add intensity to a painting just as serene scores can imply calm in the same image, shifting focus on images can create narrative and questions or captions can prompt us to respond in certain ways. Classical Art Memes, a Facebook group which has 5 million followers, demonstrates this perfectly.
You might be questioning whether this change is for the better- for what it’s worth I don’t think that a loss of reverence or religiosity for originals is a bad thing; art is now accessible and can be touched, spoken to and manipulated. I’m sure you have dogmatic men who- not unlike those who wanted to tell people what the Bible meant- are opposed to this toying and dialogue with art as they see it as a form of vandalism. I beg to differ. Comical captions make art far more appealing and wide reaching than they were sequestered away in temples of culture which shrouded works behind indecipherable jargon.
Furthermore, historical and technical placards in museums change our perception of art in the same way a meme does- the only difference is one alienates and the other engages a young audience. This is not to say the fault is with the placards however- I think that knowing where a piece of artwork comes from might help to us to understand the mindset the artist was in when he made it. Despite this, the historical and technical background of a piece of work is only part of the puzzle, and there is certainly something to be said for art being used therapeutically or comically. It shows us that’s arts meaning is not immutable.
Moroever, I think we can marry the different ways of viewing art and use them interchangeably, learning to enjoy an artwork in three ways: as something to be played with and changed, as a technical and historical piece and as a way to help us understand and alter our feelings. I won’t pretend that memes say what the artist wanted- far from it. Oftentimes their power comes from the joy of seeing a grave cultural masterpiece transformed into something comical. It’s the same joy that comes from drawing a moustache in a textbook.
The art of old is a lot less open ended than modern art. It was commissioned for political and religious purposes and had a concrete aim. Whilst the artist could express character he did it within the confines of a brief. Furthermore, memes don’t seek to tease meaning that was ever intended in pieces, they confer a meaning by manipulating them. That is their power. They are not a misunderstanding but a deliberate alteration.
In short, whilst I am almost certainly taking too high minded an approach towards Classical Art memes, I think they are a nice demonstration of the the changing relationship with art in a digital world, as discussed by Berger in Ways Of Seeing. What’s more, I like this change; gone are the days where you sit and look at a painting in awed silence. Now the interaction with great pieces happens in a bedroom with a printout you can cut and scribble on or around. People can take and make meaning in old works and make them their own with no placards to tell them what to think and what to feel. This new relationship has drawn so many in who would have avoided galleries. For that alone, I welcome it.
