After a couple of very high-profile art memes dominated 2012— Cecilia Gimenez’s “Beast Jesus” and artists’ and art institutions’ appropriations of “Gangnam Style”— you might think that 2013 was a quieter year for artworks going viral. But between a pair of poorly received royal portraits, an unexpectedly politicized duck sculpture, the art historical canon’s conversion into Emojis, and our own attempt at launching an art meme, it’s been a busy year for art on the Internet. Here are our picks for the best viral art memes of 2013.
Though it may have remained largely confined to the online art community, this meme, in which famous artists’ trademark aesthetics and most famous works are translated into a series of Emojis — a type of Japanese emoticon recently made compatible with Western smartphones — became a sensation in February. The meme allowed seemingly intricate works to be reduced to a few cartoonish icons, like Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God” (a skull and a lot of diamonds), the “Rain Room” (a downpour of raindrops with a part in the middle), or Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” (a woman and a pair of scissors). In December #EmojiArtHistory even received that ultimate marker of meme domination, transfiguration into a real-life object, when artist Man Bartlett exhibited a series of #EmojiArtHistory prints at Eyebeam as part of the art and technology center’s #Emoji exhibition.
Florentijn Hofman’s “Rubber Duck”
This enormous inflatable sculpture of a toy rubber duck could be considered a meme just by virtue of its utter ubiquity this year, as it seemed to make landfall in nearly every major East Asian city and in Pittsburgh, for its U.S. debut. But its moment of truly viral fame came in June, when a mashup of the playful public sculpture and the iconic “Tank Man” photo from the Tiananmen Square protests started circulating online on the 24th anniversary of the demonstrations. The Chinese government promptly banned searches of the phrase “big yellow duck” from Weibo, the country’s favored micro-blogging platform.
While not obviously related to visual art, this fast-forgotten meme — in which the Baauer song “The Harlem Shake” plays in a crowded room where only one person dances while everyone else goes about their business and then, when the beat crescendos, everyone busts a move — this one makes the list because the voice that speaks the iconic command “Do the Harlem Shake” is that of Jayson Musson, also known as Hennessy Youngman, an artist who was in the Philadelphia-based rap group Plastic Little from whose song “Miller Time” the lyric was sampled.
In March, amid the Human Rights Campaign’s push to raise support for marriage equality in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people changed their social media profile pictures to red and pink renditions of the campaign’s iconic “equals” sign logo, with many of them incorporating art historical allusions, from modernist classics like Mark Rothko and Dan Flavin, to more contemporary imagery drawn from Keith Haring or Tilda Swinton’s sleeping performance at MoMA.
In January, London’s National Portrait Gallery unveiled artist Paul Emsley’s portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, immediately inciting a media furor over what many took to be a very unflattering image of the young royal. The internet had a field day with the poorly received portrait, creating mashups that fused Middleton with everything from “Beast Jesus” to Vigo, the villain from “Ghostbusters 2.”
Danish Royal Family Portraitgate
Not ones to lose out to the Brits without a fight — even if that fight is over highly questionable portraits — the Danish royal family commissioned artist Thomas Kluge to create a sprawling, intergenerational portrait, the family’s first in 125 years. The resulting image, in which toddlers either float in a kind of post-apocalyptic limbo, or stare out at the viewer with heart-stopping, “Children of the Corn”-like gazes, while an apparent rip in the time-space continuum offers a glimpse of an ancient ruin as a backdrop. Kluge’s Photoshop-evoking aesthetic seemed ripe for online parody, but this meme never took off the way we expected it would.
If 2013 was the year of cat art — stay tuned for ARTINFO’s list of the best cat art of 2013 — the dominant feline in that field was Grumpy Cat, who not only won the Walker Art Center’s second annual Internet Cat Video Festival, but was also the focus of a benefit exhibition at Alabama’s Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment studio complex in May. Each artist with a studio in the building contributed a portrait of the temperamental kitty, with sales helping to raise funds for a local playground.
We were so struck by a hilarious picture of performance artist Tino Sehgal holding up the Golden Lion he won at this year’s Venice Biennale, and seemingly struggling mightily to lift the tiny statuette, that we proposed the “Struggling Sehgal,” in which the artist tries with all his might to lift random objects, from Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass” boulder to a Jeff Koons gazing ball. Though the meme failed to catch on, we stand by it.
To see images of 2013’s best art memes, click the slideshow.
