Inside out: Ogled iz umetnosti mimova i mimovanja umetnosti
Inside out: The Meming of Art and the Art of Meming

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to offer an analysis of complex relations between memes in art, and the art of memes. It is an experiment in thinking about a tremendous body of images present in the contemporary Internet culture, through selected examples and Instagram pages. Noticing that we are living in the age of “overheating” (Thomas Hylland Eriksen), in the time of accelerated change, this work asks questions about the position of images, memes, and “high art” within this chaotic environment. Making a selection from @classical_art_memes_official and @classicalcringe Instagram pages, this work comments upon the usage of the terms classic and classical in cyberspace, as well as their extended meaning inside meme culture. Selected memes reveal the contemporary nature of the gaze directed from meme-makers to “classical” images. The meaning of classical images within meme culture is transformed, and dedicated to “now and here”, to the feeling of the contemporary world, problems and thoughts. The historical contextualization of the artwork is lost, and the context of these old objects now is their function in the transfer of updated, meme messages. On the other hand, in local, (post)Yugoslav space, Instagram page @umetnostkaze is seen in the form of a diary of fun learning, in which meming the art is done in agreement with the recording of chosen art history facts. In a search for memes in artworld, this paper makes a critical comment on selected examples of meme transformation in paintings, as well as on the implementation of meme poetics in artistic drawing. For this purpose, the work of Lauren Kaelin and her Benjamemes is presented and compared with the NFT phenomenon, with the “return of the aura” discourse, and the dialogue with Benjamin’s concept of the artwork aura. The recent exhibition “Family Reunion” of the artist Alim Smith, and his surrealistic treatment of Black Memes, opens questions about the condition of Black presence in Internet culture and creates a critical space and dialogue in relation to the usage of digital blackface and its heritage. Differently, in a local context, the popular drawings by Jelena Milićević are witnesses of the possibility to implement the poetics of Internet memes in the artworld, simultaneously making a symbiosis between art as “high culture” and memes as “popular culture”. This paper, as an experiment in thinking about the relations between memes and art, outlines this delicate and fresh space within contemporary visual culture, emphasizing that in the age of image domination, and their loss of meaning, there is a time-sensitive field where memes and art as images are able to express the Zeitgeist we are living, as well as to keep and comment upon our heritage in a witty and brave mode of thinking.

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