It’s no secret that classical art is not something everyone enjoys equally. Some people might even say they find it difficult to understand. Memes, on the other hand, are pretty universal and easily digestible. With some minor changes, such as altering the text, for instance, or translating it to a different language, they can become relatable to a vast audience of internet users.
Having that in mind, it’s safe to assume that turning classical art into memes might make it more appealing to some people. Chances are, one might find it boring to roam a museum for hours, but they wouldn’t notice time fly by when browsing the same paintings on their phone, if they featured some amusing quips.
A study delving deeper into associations between emotions, museum visitors’ posts, and memes found that positive emotions predominated when it came to both – museum visitors and Instagram users interacting with artworks in the form of paintings or memes.
“According to our findings, people may have been surprised to encounter artworks that they had previously viewed as memes during both scheduled and spontaneous visits,” the study read in part.
For Bored Panda’s previous edition on the ‘Classical Sarcasm’ project, a representative of the team behind it shared that it’s the everyday struggles that are depicted in the memes that attract so many young and old followers.
They continued to point out that in their opinion, the content they share helps internet users appreciate classical art more. "Surely, classical art was almost forgotten without social media! Every painting has a story behind it, and those stories are being told with every meme we make," they told Bored Panda back then.
The representative of the ‘Classical Sarcasm’ team told Bored Panda last year that there’s no such thing as a ‘bad’ meme because every person looks at memes from a different angle. And they seem to look at a looot of them on a regular basis – some statistics suggest that the average millennial looks at 20-30 memes every day.
But just like memes, art is highly subjective, too. And there is no one way to look at one piece, as it might evoke different emotions to different people. So it’s no surprise that what people consider art differs from person to person as well.
A survey carried out by YouGov found that the vast majority of the general public consider classical paintings art; as much as 92% of respondents said that they view Da Vinci’s iconic ‘Mona Lisa’ as art, 94% of them did Vettriano’s ‘Singing Buttler’, and 78% did Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. However, the modern kind of creations were not as widely accepted as art.
While ‘Mona Lisa’ was clearly art in most people’s eyes, according to YouGov’s survey, only 42% of respondents put Andy Warhol's ‘Campbells soup can’ in the same category. Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ from 1998, as well as Marcel Duschamp’s ‘Fountain’ from 1917, didn’t make it to the list, either, as only 12% of respondents considered the latter two pieces art.
If you’re a fan who prefers to admire artwork from the comfort of their home, you might want to give Bored Panda’s category dedicated to all sorts of art a look next. But if it’s memes that you enjoy more than anything, you should probably head to the meme category instead.