Are Memes Art?

Internet memes we create, share, and enjoy are similar to works of art. However, internet memes, like all memes, are temporal and changing in a way quite unlike other art forms. Internet memes change and spread over time through the people who create and share them. Variation is a required part of the meme creation process, and replication is often essential to the meme sharing process. If creative variation doesn’t occur, sharing diminishes. At some point, a meme ceases to exist, as a meme, when variations are no longer created and shared. To help explain how the changing, temporal nature of memes differs importantly from other art, this chapter highlights a conceptual tension that occurs when memes are assumed to be art. To do this, we employ the Meme Art Puzzle, which offers an inconsistent set of three statements describing conceptual relationships among memes, art, variety, and the faithful reproduction of art. While each statement is plausible on its own, the statements cannot all be true taken together without creating a contradiction. At best, only two of the statements from the Meme Art Puzzle may be true at any given time, and ultimately, this chapter argues that we ought to give up on considering memes art, but the arguments herein are far from conclusive. A beautiful feature of art is that it often seems to abhor definition and works actively subvert expectations. Nevertheless, creating art is a kind of human activity, and so defining art too broadly—to include too many things—will fail to distinguish it from other human activity.