“If female rage was a painting, it might look like this,” begins a Vox video on Auguste Toulmouche’s 1866 painting, The Hesitant Fiancée. A sinister rendition of Giuseppe Verdi’s Dies Irae – literally translating to Day of Wrath – plays in the background, infamous for its intense and cataclysmic melodies. This 60-second YouTube short, shared in November 2023, emerged amidst a rising tide of memes exploring female frustration and fury. One TikTok video, in particular, emerged as a standout among the flood of content. User @ioannaalaiska paired The Hesitant Fiancée with Dies Irae, captioning it, “When a man tries to say something ‘philosophical’ but it’s a thought I had when I was 11.” The response was staggering, with the video amassing an astonishing 18.6 million views and sparking a multitude of remixes and reinterpretations. But what’s truly fascinating is the way in which this 19th-century artwork found new resonance in the digital age. How does a piece of art, seemingly frozen in time, manage to navigate the ever-shifting currents of contemporary culture? And what does it signify when art, traditionally interwoven with societal norms and values, takes on a new life as a meme?
Before delving deeper into the memeification of art, it’s essential to grasp the fundamentals of internet memes. Memes are a prime example of remediation, a concept outlined by scholars Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their seminal work, Remediation: Understanding New Media. Essentially, memes repurpose, or as Bolter and Grusin put it, remediate older forms of media—like a 19th-century painting—and transform them into new digital expressions, redefining their meaning in the process. Memes operate as cultural mutations, echoing biologist Richard Dawkins’ analogy of cultural behaviour as a ‘meme.’ Dawkins suggests that within the field of genetics, ‘memes’ spread and evolve within a cultural context, akin to a viral contagion, relying on shared understanding and interpretation to thrive. Hence, without a shared cultural understanding of certain events, a piece of content fails to become a meme, simply because it lacks the capacity to replicate and carry cultural ideas and symbols.
So, now that we understand how deeply entrenched memes have to be in popular culture in order to stay relevant, the surprising use of older classical art is something that is bound to spark intrigue, especially in the ways it seems to transcend explicit class divisions. Throughout history, art has generally been considered an exclusionary hobby, generally untapped by the general public but widely enjoyed in societies of a higher status. Some even go as far as saying that having the means to dissect and research a piece of artwork “layered” with ambiguity is, in essence, aristocratic. Memes, on the other hand, are more universal. It takes a seemingly exclusive and “high brow” activity and grounds it, making it more tangible to a wider audience, all while evolving the landscape of cultural expression. On the flip side, we are also seeing the rise of a kind of renaissance, where memes are now also being considered a legitimate art form and social critique. In August 2016, an art exhibition called What Do You Meme? took place in London, where curator Maisie Posts writes, “[Memes] will no longer be viewed as poor taste or low culture but will be portrayed as the most democratic art form.” In Los Angeles, the February 2017 exhibition By Any Memes Necessary took place, where curator ka5sh similarly writes, “I remember my friend was saying memes are a part of the neo-Dada movement. And I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded tight, so I googled it and I feel the same way, like this is the next wave of art.” Furthermore, Arran Rees, a research associate at the University of Leeds, postulated that memes are part of our digital cultural heritage and that, “… museums and archives around the world should be collecting them.”
All in all, memes have evolved into legitimate and “valid pieces of artistic expression”, though many still fail to understand their integral role in culture. But I like to think of all of this as some obscure, Andy Warhol-esque movement—one that challenges the history of art elitism while retaining a healthy dose of humour. After all, it’s not every day that history and hilarity collide in such an intriguing fashion.