Where is the meme art?

Memes as a cultural phenomenon

The first meme was the simple smiley 😉 , which was sent by computer science professor Scott E. Fahlman on September 19, 1982, in the Usenet of Carnegie Mellon University.

The smiley is known as an emoticon, and Fahlman is considered its inventor, right? True, but on a higher level, this emoticon also a piece of internet culture that can become a meme through online transmission. If it spreads and gains influence – we all know that this is exactly what happened and continues to happen with the smiley.

In 1996 came the dancing Ugachaka baby (by web developer John Woodell; let it dance again, yeah):

1999 Hampton's Hamster House (“The Hampsterdance Song”)

with initial measurable success of 17 million visitors per day over three months, shortly afterwards Advice animals + Lolcats in abundance and much more… and then finally more serious content.

Memes are fleeting, funny, ironic – and often so off-key that secondhand embarrassment is the natural reaction. Online, however, memes aren't quite so ephemeral; not as fleeting as that brilliant flash of insight from your friend that, once again, couldn't be jotted down somewhere in time… Because of this, there's little reason to let bad memes ruin your life, as there's already a decent selection, and there could be a much wider range of witty and creatively designed options. More on that later; first, let's take a look at the content and form of the memes currently dominating the internet:

From cute picture to influential communication tool

Today, memes are used not only to spread comments and jokes, but also statements on political debates, complaints about excessive public bureaucracy, frustration with the failures of public transport, and so on. The meme has matured and lost its innocence. It has evolved into a means of communication that also conveys serious content and elicits serious reactions (sometimes, which would be a shame otherwise).

Such memes influence the masses ; they are deliberately used for this purpose by companies that want to influence the masses. Some of the most successful memes of 2018 clearly demonstrate this: In January, Google launched a selfie feature via its Arts & Culture app. It was intended to allow users to search for photos of their faces in famous paintings and thus, according to Google, stimulate general interest in art and culture.

Behind this was the testing of facial recognition technology – by the time data protection advocates protested, many unsuspecting art enthusiasts had irrevocably entrusted their physiognomy to a Google database. Viewed in a broader social context, however, the campaign backfired: The memes also garnered more attention for data protection advocates, allowing them to alert millions of previously uncritical users to the unbridled data greed of the search engine operator.

Even the latest warning in some laundry detergent commercials – “Keep laundry detergent away from children” – was triggered by a wave of memes. Teenagers were clearly trying to boost click rates and thus their perceived personal internet fame, but their brains were obviously preoccupied with other matters.

In the “Tide Pod Challenge,” the teenage community was encouraged to eat laundry detergent pods and film themselves doing so. The most brainless teens took part, and from the beginning of the year until February 15, 2018, 86 young people were admitted to US emergency rooms with mouth burns, seizures, pulmonary edema, respiratory arrest, coma, etc. (see Merkur: Eating laundry detergent for clicks – why it can end in a coma ).

This meme had a very lasting effect: Millions of consumers who had previously simply bought laundry detergent now wondered what the hell was in the stuff that was sending teenagers to the emergency room in droves, and switched to non-toxic organic detergents.

There are (few) better examples of influential communication through memes, but the following still applies:

Memes can be inspiring

People are easily and readily enthusiastic about enjoyable, stimulating interruptions to their daily routines, flashes of inspiration, and small surprises. This is not only a good thing, but a fundamental human need – neurobiological research has long since discovered that the capacity for enthusiasm creates a "favorable environment" in the brain.

This refers to a mindset that promotes the formation of certain brain connections, namely all the synapses that are formed during learning, understanding, and development… Enthusiasm comes from practice, so a little enthusiasm every day.

Since enjoyable, stimulating phenomena have become rare in the everyday lives of many people these days (or rather, enrich the everyday lives of all people too rarely; no one has ever complained about too much stimulation and joy), creative minds have used the internet from the very beginning to bring a little bit of pep and fun into everyday life.

Through bizarre videos, silly-cute cat pictures, dancing comic characters – all of which become memes when they are framed by an (in)appropriate saying, amuse people, and are then/therefore distributed wildly through the net.

The internet meme was defined in 2009 by author Patrick Davison in the essay “The Language of Internet Memes” as follows: “An internet meme is a piece of culture, usually a joke, that gains influence through online transmission.” (see Academia: Makes a Meme Instead: A Concise History of Internet Memes , p. 3).

Memes have been bringing fun to people's everyday lives for a whole decade. On the one hand, this suggests that memes will likely remain a part of internet culture for a long time to come; on the other hand, while the meme has undergone the development described above into a (also) serious means of communication during this long period, it hasn't learned much graphically

Call for revolt against Impact!

Memes, those cute, mocking, quirky internet jokes, are presented in their classic form with a font that is... simply garbage:

Impact was developed in 1965 as a lead typeface and was therefore already outdated at the time of its creation. Every reasonably progressive printing company had been striving to use the new phototypesetting processes since the early 1960s, and the first digital typesetting methods were already emerging.

Impact was intended to make an impression (e.g., in the headlines of the then rapidly growing media and advertising world; the typeface has no place in body text) – and that is what the font does, in an uncharming way that has nothing to do with elegant design: Impact shouts at the reader; what comes across in Impact was obviously conceived in a bad state of mind.

Today, this clunky, attention-grabbing font holds a firm place among the world's most disliked typefaces. This typographic disaster is truly only suitable for memes intended to spread bad moods or frustration, or to immediately identify its creator as a graphic design novice.

This collection of the “best memes 2018” proved to be aesthetically unusually gruesome overall, until Firefox crashed in a huff: Thrillist: The 108 Best Memes of 2018. It doesn't have to be that way; memes haven't made a pact with the devil that binds them to perpetual ugliness.

The best memes of 2018 (worldwide)

Art (PhD) with Art Memes

Memes are a cultural phenomenon that, in its various forms, reaches millions of people. Here are some examples that have reached millions, and ultimately billions, of people over the years (see PC World: The 30 funniest internet memes ).

Haha, funny? Well, yes, but you don't have to be a professional humorist to suspect there's more to it. However, memes are generally rare in German-speaking countries – which could be due, for example, to an instinctive aversion to impact in the region that invented typesetting, or to the difficulty of crafting witty aphorisms in the rather opulent German language.

There are some really funny (dialect-infused) examples from Switzerland, a few laugh-inducing memes from Austria ( Buzzfeed: 21 memes that are only funny if you're Austrian ), and a great many rather stupid to embarrassing memes from Germany (no offense intended to any author, just search for memes from Germany on Facebook and other platforms).

It's a shame, and not really a reflection of the creative people in Germany (in the DACH region) – because memes don't have to be limited to the blaring font "Impact" and offer creative people many opportunities: attention – and if the meaning of the meme is only understood upon closer inspection, even quite lasting attention. With clever (non-offensive, apolitical, and non-religious) content, the author has the audience laughing.

Memes can communicate serious, critical content in a relaxed way, without immediately provoking defensive reactions.

And memes can of course become delightful miniature works of art if some of the many people who are knowledgeable about fonts and typesetting, photos and photo editing get to work (one can only imagine what might come of it if artists took on memes)..

Joachim Rodriguez y Romero

Owner and Managing Director of Kunstplaza . Publicist, editor, and passionate blogger in the fields of art, design, and creativity since 2011. Graduated with a degree in web design from university (2008). Further developed creative techniques through courses in freehand drawing, expressive painting, and theatre/acting. Profound knowledge of the art market gained through years of journalistic research and numerous collaborations with key players and institutions in the arts and culture sector.

www.kunstplaza.de