FROM ISSUE 32#3: WHAT’S THE USE? Why Do We Meme?

A small-scale, personal exploration of the ways we use memes, from ‘The main reason half the world has not committed die’ to ‘Me getting euthanized 😎’

Merthe Voorhoeve

Like most people of the Gen Z generation, I spent some of my formative years on the internet. Internet culture and memes have been a part of my life since I was around the age of twelve. It all started with an odd-looking frog[1] and a socially awkward penguin,[2] and somehow, I have now ended up with a somewhat extensive ‘personal’ collection of memes, consisting of ‘saved’ posts on Instagram and Twitter,[3] and probably thousands of screenshotted images. When scrolling through these memes, I often wonder, besides smiling and giggling to myself, why am I doing this? Why are we doing this? By ‘this,’ I mean, both the saving of these images as well as repeatedly revisiting them, sometimes laughing out loud like I have not seen a meme at least ten times by now, and always feeling a weirdly deep sense of affective satisfaction.

Curing Our Depression
In just the last two decades, the ‘meme’ has gone from a relatively peripheral internet phenomenon to an almost ever-present figure or mode of communication, which has now gone ‘beyond the internet, beyond discourse, and beyond the image.’[4] Far from only taking the form of humorous images of cats to be shared with friends on the web, memes have found their way into the world(s) of art, music, and advertisement. Despite, or perhaps because of this prevalence, the concept of the ‘meme’ can be difficult to describe accurately. Internet phenomena, residing in another ‘realm’ than our ‘irl,’ real life-reality, sometimes seem to escape our everyday language. For instance, describing a strangely funny meme to your parent might feel like trying to describe a dream you had. Something you experienced, but do not really understand yourself. 

To find out how others have attempted to describe memes, I visit Urban Dictionary. Originally meant as an ‘alternative’ dictionary for ‘slang’ words and phrases,[5] Urban Dictionary is a website that follows the ‘democratic’ logic of most social media websites: anyone can submit descriptions to popular words and phrases and the entry receiving the most ‘thumbs up’ will feature as the ‘top definition.’ The top definition of ‘memes’ says: ‘The cure of depression,’ which surprises me. Interestingly, the top second contribution follows a similar path, taking a dark turn halfway: ‘Memes are a lifestyle and art used by teens and adults who are willing to actually live a life that doesn't include depression. Technically the main reason half the world has not committed die.’[6] Even though topics such as ‘depression’ and being ‘tired of life’ often occur in popular meme imagery, I did not expect to find such a distinct emphasis on them here. Echoing the cliché phrase that ‘laughter is the best medicine,’ are memes really helping us cope with our mental health issues?

When thinking of the notion of memes as a cure for depression, I do not think we should understand ‘depression’ in a strictly individualised medical sense. Rather, we should think of it in societal terms. Some would argue that individualised mental states are always a farce, that our mental health coincides with the state of the larger framework in which our lives take place (culture, politics, economics). In other words, what we are describing as depression might just be a ‘natural response’ to the horrors of living through late capitalism, climate emergency, and countless other crises. At the very least, our mental state and the ‘state of the world’ cross-pollinate each other, but opinions differ when it comes to the main direction of this influence. Arguing against Jordan Peterson’s notion that we need to ‘clean our room before we can better the world,’ Slavoj Žižek has asserted that no, it is the opposite: we cannot clean our room (read: properly organise our mental space) when the world itself is a mess.[7]

How should we interpret this societal depression? Depression is always accompanied by a sense of hopelessness: things are not going well, and it seems highly improbable, or even impossible, that they will get better in the future. Uncoincidentally, this description perfectly captures the way a lot of us feel about the world right now. For instance, in a survey on eco-anxiety among Gen Z published in The Lancet, more than half of the sixteen to twenty-five-year-olds said that they believe humanity is doomed.[8] Taking this fact into consideration, the popular meme catchphrase that tells us we will live to see ‘manmade horrors beyond our imagination’ may start to make a lot more sense. 

Meme-ing Through It All 

In what way could memes be of help here? How do they contribute to ‘living a life that doesn’t include depression’? Firstly, an important aspect of memes is, of course, that they evoke laughter. Musical artist ‘Scoobert Doobert,’ whose practice revolves around popular internet imagery, says in an interview on memes: ‘I think that the human impulse to laugh is one of our greatest strengths just to cope with existence.’[9] In this sense, laughter can be seen as a distraction, even a form of escapism. But when I look at the memes that really speak to me personally, they often prominently feature the problems which frighten me the most, which is why the affective satisfaction they offer me cannot merely be a matter of escapism. Take a look, for instance, at the following meme: 

I posted this meme on my Instagram story when the extreme-right political party PVV won the Dutch elections on November 22, 2023. Why did I reply to this tragic event with a joke? Probably because laughter, especially shared laughter, also creates a sense of community. In Scoobert Doobert’s words: ‘a joke is often an observation about the world, so when someone laughs at your joke, it's because they share some of your underlying assumptions about the way the world works.’[10] As a baseline, a meme garners some sort of interpersonal recognition: ‘There is the impression of there being someone else out there, someone who is like me but not me. […], the circulation of memes articulates the presence of an other.’[11] We know by now that misery loves company, and these types of memes express that, yes, we may be laughing together, but simultaneously we are acknowledging that a lot is (going) wrong with the world. So, this meme – known as ‘Dmitri Finds Out’[12] – helps me cope with the rising popularity of extreme-right politics in my country in two ways: it makes me laugh, which eases the pain, and it makes me feel less alone with my worries. Those who saw and liked my story might have had the same reaction: widening the circulation of the longed for ‘Other.’

Is there any limit to topics that can be ‘memed’ about? While writing this piece, I stumbled upon an Instagram post. It featured a screenshot of a tweet by the user @dutchlauren, an account belonging to Lauren Hoeve, a blogger who suffered from the chronic multisystem disease ME. Her illness was progressive, and her days mainly consisted of lying in bed. She decided that life was not worth living for her anymore, and last January Lauren was euthanised.[13] While most people probably cannot even imagine having to make such a decision, Lauren kept a sense of humour about her situation until the very end. She announced her decision to her followers by posting, you guessed it, a meme. Accompanied by the text: ‘This will be my last tweet. Thanks for the love, everyone. I’m going to rest a bit more and be with my loved ones. Enjoy a last morbid meme from me. ❤️ 😎 👍.’ The meme looked like this:

While Lauren’s tweet struck me in such a way that I felt I had to include it here, the fact that memes appear in – and out of – every possible context does not really surprise me. Memes have an addictive quality to them; they are susceptible to endless variation and, in many ways, they simplify conveying a message. Besides, truly anything can be turned into a meme, by anyone who wishes to do so. 

Get Memed! 

At times, I feel that memes have gotten into my head. By which I mean, that now and then, my thoughts and feelings are mentally transformed to fit into existing meme formats, or imagined as not yet existing memetic material. This also begs the question: who is really in control here? Citing Slavoj Žižek again: ‘Memes, misperceived by us, subjects, as means of our communication, effectively run the show (they use us to reproduce and multiply themselves) […].’[14] In other words, memes are not ‘used’ by us, they are active agents: penetrating our imaginations, forming our thoughts, and affecting our bodies, which they use as vessels.  

In Kristoffer Borgli’s new film Dream Scenario (2023), we find an ad absurdum exploration of this concept. Nicolas Cage plays Paul, an archetypical anti-hero, who wakes up one day to find that he is appearing in the dreams of people all around the world. As a result, he goes massively ‘viral.’ Cage has said in an interview with CNN that this story is actually reminiscent of his real-life experience, having been ‘meme-ified’ himself when clips of his exuberant acting and facial expressions were widely circulating online.[15] In the film, Paul is at first delighted at the thought of starring in the dreams of possibly millions of people, but his life slowly but surely turns into an all-encompassing nightmare. 

The employability of memes seems to be endless. Why do we meme? The answer could be anything, ranging from trying to ‘cure our depression,’ to coping with a disappointing or genuinely frightening election result, or even announcing that you will be euthanised. No matter the situation we find ourselves in, we can always resort to ‘meme-ing’ about it. At the same time, memes might actually be the ones in control, taking the form of a parasitic presence in our (collective) consciousness. Either way, it seems that most of us who are active participants of the web have formed, whether we wanted to or not, a special bond with memes, which might even be described as: ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to meme and to be memed, till death us do part.’ 

Merthe Voorhoeve (2000) is an editor at Simulacrum Magazine and an art history student at the University of Amsterdam. She is interested in culture in the broad sense, and likes to view literature, visual arts, cinema, and internet phenomena through a curious contemporary lens.

[1] KnowYourMeme, “Pepe the Frog,” accessed February 8, 2024,  <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-the-frog>.

[2] KnowYourMeme, “Socially Awkward Penguin,” accessed February 8, 2024, <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/socially-awkward-penguin>. 

[3] Now called ‘X,’ courtesy of some idiot billionaire. I will, however, keep calling the website by its former name. 

[4] Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson, Daniel de Zeeuw, “Introduction: Global Mutations of the Viral Image,” in Critical Meme Reader, eds. Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson, Daniel de Zeeuw (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures,  2021): 15. 

[5] Christine Ro, “How Linguists are Using Urban Dictionary,” Daily JSTor, accessed March 9, 2024, <https://daily.jstor.org/how-linguists-are-using-urban-dictionary/>.

[6] ‘Committed die’ is typical ‘meme-speak’ (meaning: committing suicide), in which the bending or outright breaking of grammar rules adds to the comedic, and/or absurdist, value of the meme. 

[7] Iwouldprefernotto49, “Zizek Challenges Peterson: “Set Your House in Order Before You Change the World?”, YouTube, accessed April 21, 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBMmcX-5INQ>. 

[8] Caroline Hickman et al, “Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey,” The Lancet 5, no. 12 (2021): 

[9] Max Horwich, “Masks, Monsters, and Memes: in Conversation with Scoobert Doobert,” in Critical Meme Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2021): 85. 

[10] Max Horwich, “Masks, Monsters, and Memes: in Conversation with Scoobert Doobert,” 85. 

[11] Anthony Glyn Burton, “Wojak’s Lament: Excess and Voyeurism under Platform Capitalism,” in Critical Meme Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2021): 19. 

[12] KnowYourMeme, “Dimitri Finds Out,” accessed 25 February, 2024,  <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dimitri-finds-out>.

[13] RTL, “Lauren Hoeve overleden: Als je leven geen geschenk meer is, mag je het teruggeven,” accessed March 1, 2024,, <https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/artikel/5431589/lauren-hoeve-overleden-vermoeidheidsziekte-me-cvs-euthanasie-zondaginterview>.

[14] Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011): 132. 

[15] KnowYourMeme, “Nicolas Cage,” accessed March 26, 2024, <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/nicolas-cage/>.

FROM ISSUE 32#3: WHAT’S THE USE? À Propos Use: Duchamp and the Canon

VITA OSTENDORF

Marcel Duchamp’s notorious readymade Fountain (1917) has squeezed itself into art history and later proved to be of great importance to other art movements. The journey of its presence and absence offers valuable insights into the different means that can be employed to bestow a certain status upon an artwork. Despite current, lingering uncertainty regarding who originated the idea for Fountain, Duchamp’s manipulation of public perception and strategic use of reproduction underscore his reach.

The Rejected Fountain

Fountain is a Dadaist readymade that was famously rejected for the first exhibition of The Society of Independent Artists (1917) in New York.[1] The mechanically produced porcelain urinal was not ‘made’ by the artist, but merely bought and signed by a non-existing R. Mutt. The decision to submit  Fountain for this exhibition organised by The Society of Independent Artists made sense specifically given the organisation’s unconventional ethos. Playing by different rules than your average exhibition: the board allowed everyone willing to pay the admission price of $6 to display their work. However, the board of The Society did not expect to come across a urinal on the day of the opening, and immediately decided to refuse and hide it from the public.[2] Clearly, Fountain was not considered a serious artwork.

Meanwhile, Duchamp, himself a member of The Society’s board, secretly watched his colleagues reject his anonymous application, and decided to resign from the board.[3] To make a statement about the hypocrisy of this decision, he decided to publish on ‘The Case of R. Mutt’ in the Dadaist magazine The Blind Man, of which he was the co-editor. Various authors denounced the The Society’s preconceptions about what art should be.[4] As artist Beatrice Wood commented:

“Now, Mr. Mutts fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bath tub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ show windows. Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”[5]

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

The articles were accompanied by the first reproduction of Fountain: a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.[6] After this publication, New York’s art scene was finally introduced to Fountain, the readymade so shocking that it was not deemed art. However, the only problem now was that Fountain had been lost. Art historians are still unsure about what happened with the original after it left Stieglitz’s studio.[7] Consequently, because it came to be physically absent, its momentum soon died out. [8]

Now, more than a hundred years after the publication about Fountain in The Blind Man, texts about this series of events have been reproduced when the work is presented in museums, exhibitions, books, and documentaries. The initial rejection of the sculpture is framed to be the artwork’s full story. Such a narrative leaves out a the irony of how an artwork was rejected, unaccepted, and even lost, while now the opposite is true; Fountain is displayed all over the world, and considered a canonical sculpture for Dada and conceptual art. How could that be? What happened between then and now that flipped the urinal’s reputation? After the momentum it had following the rejection and publication, Fountain was not seen publicly or written about for at least twenty five years. The relative attention it got compared to other art by Duchamp was small and only decreased as Duchamp eventually started stepping away from art to focus on chess around 1920.[9] Only when the first physical reproduction was made, Fountain became a part of public discourse again, gaining a reputation. Yet this only happened in 1950 – within a totally different (art-historical) context.

The Reproductions

What all canonical artworks have in common is their visibility. While this may sound simple, it is crucial; if an artwork is to be retained and interpreted by many people, its perceptibility is key. As a readymade, Fountain was easy to reproduce. In 1950, Duchamp was invited to partake in the Dadaist group exhibition, Challenge and Defy: Extreme Examples by XX Century Artists, French and American, by the New York gallerist Sidney Janis. Janis, a popular art collector who would greatly influence modern art,[10] proposed to Duchamp to include Fountain in the show.[11] It would mark Fountain’s first public appearance through its first physical replica: a vintage urinal that Janis scavenged on a flea market, authenticated by Duchamp’s signature.[12] The same Janis replica would be a part of a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York eleven years later in 1961, called The Art of Assemblage. Although Fountain was not highlighted as Duchamp’s most important artwork in the accompanying catalogue written by curator William Seitz, he nonetheless described Duchamp as an intelligent and enigmatic individual.[13] Eventually, Duchamp’s persona would become an essential factor in the reception of his body of work. 

In 1963 and 1964, two other reproductions were carried out, both of a different character. In 1963, the year Duchamp witnessed his first retrospective exhibition in California, Fountain was reproduced in Europe by the Swedish art critic Ulf Linde.[14] Linde was an admirer of Duchamp’s oeuvre and was engaged in the process of reproducing each of his readymades – out of pure passion. While Duchamp did not witness this process in person, he approved the reproductions and contacted Linde via letters and telegrams. A year later, in 1964, another admirer of Duchamp, Arturo Schwarz, arranged to replicate his work with him.[15] This time with a contract for commercial purposes; all thirteen readymades were reproduced in a series of eight to be shown at the exhibition Hommage to Marcel Duchamp. Aside from some extra reproductions intended for the gallerist and the artist themselves, all replicas were intended to be sold after exhibiting.[16] Arturo Schwarz also published a catalogue raisonné about Duchamp’s entire oeuvre called The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (1964),[17] solidifying Fountain’s place in the artistic canon.

By allowing Fountain to be reproduced, the visibility of the work expanded. Not just because the frequency of reproduction had increased, but also because Duchamp was criticised for multiplying his work. In public interviews, for example, questions were raised about Duchamp’s intentions.[18] Privately, he was contacted by his network, including Alfred Barr, the director of the MoMA, who had written Duchamp to express his discontents about the unnotified reproductions and the possible depreciation of the Janis-replica from 1950 now housed in the MoMA’s collection.[19] However, decades later, the reproductions would prove lucrative. With all this visibility, public attention, books, and exhibitions that included Fountain, the portrayal of the urinal and the artist became explicit. Especially in Schwarz’s catalogue raisonné, in which Duchamp’s personality is described, Duchamp’s status becomes larger than life. Schwarz presented quotes by Duchamp and other intellectuals, like the great chess player Aaron Nimzowitsch and others like Plato and Shakespeare, alongside each other..[20] The catalogue, therefore, insinuates these are Duchamp’s peers. Within Duchamp’s conceptual context, it is not the applicatory technique of the maker that makes the artist, it is the use of the catalogue that cements his status. 

Multiple art-historical contexts

There is a historical discrepancy when we consider the gap in time between the conception of Fountain in 1917 and the last commercial reproduction in 1964, when Duchamp had started to be considered an old master, aged seventy-seven. In 1917, Fountain’s statement clearly fit within Dada’s legacy. But when he decided to reproduce Fountain, it appears Duchamp was influenced by a different art-historical context. It is rather likely that around the sixties  newer movements, such as Neo-Dada and Pop Art, had caught his attention.[21] This reference was already made in the press in 1964, where an American interviewer called Duchamp the ‘daddy of Dada’ or maybe even ‘the granddad of Pop.’ Duchamp would undoubtedly have answered that he could appreciate the ‘sensible’ side of Pop Art. If we consider the context, it is plausible that he would have consciously anticipated the popularity of Pop Art. For example, Duchamp and Warhol had met in 1963, the year after Warhol’s iconic Campbell Soup’s Cans (1962); and in 1964, Warhol exhibited his immensely popular sculpture Brillo Boxes, which is effectively a readymade: a stack of commercial packaging. It is, therefore, likely that Warhol’s popularity inspired Duchamp.[22]   

Near the end of Duchamp’s life in the sixties, he witnessed several worldwide retrospectives of his work. However, the economic value of most of his art increased incredibly years after his passing in 1968. In 1999, Fountain was sold for the first time for over a million dollars (1.7M USD) at an auction.[23] The buyer cited its representation of the origin of contemporary art as the reason for the purchase. The International Herald Tribune contextualised this acquisition by highlighting not just the increase of activity on the art market in general, but also that: 

“the new generation of buyers take note of a name with celebrity, like Marcel Duchamp. The Punch, the bang, is essential, the detail barely relevant.”[24] 

This underscores how the public’s perception of  Duchamp and Fountain is centred around their reputation. Evidently, catalogues and exhibitions play a crucial role in defining what should be retained about the artist and his work. 

In the case of Fountain, what history did not tell us is how and when the readymade was perceived by a public. However, the clear documentation of what happened with Fountain in 1917 has lent historical backing to ensure the object’s continued popularity in later books, catalogues, and articles.  What matters is not how many people read The Blind Man and the article about Fountain in 1917. What matters most is that the story was reproduced so many times and has become so comprehensible within the art historical canon that we can now rely on its logic. And indeed, it does follow that Duchamp influenced later art movements in the twentieth century, as he was alive and kicking exactly around that time, albeit as an old master. The repetition and reproduction of this readymade, combined with many external factors, like a growing art market or connections with museums, have made this artwork iconic. Fountain, therefore, serves an extremely important function in the logic of conceptual art and the art. How the urinal is made or what it looks like is barely relevant. Duchamp might have eliminated the function of the pot, but he allowed the concept of reception to work in his favour.

Vita Ostendorf (1996) holds a BA in Art History and is currently an MA student in Museum Studies at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory, and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include the ambiguity of the transmission of memory, and the larger institutional dynamics which define heritage. 

[1] William Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917,” in Marcel Duchamp, red. Rudolf Kuenzli en Francis Naumann (Londen: The MIT Press, 1989): 64-94.  

[2] Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917,” 71.  

[3] Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917,” 71.  

[4] Ibid, 76.

[5] Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, “The Richard Mutt Case,” in The Blind Man, ed. Marcel Duchamp (New York: H.P. Roché, 1917): 5.  

[6] Duchamp, Roché and Wood, “The Richard Mutt Case,” in The Blind Man, 1917, 4.  

[7] Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917,” 88.

[8] Francis Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Readymade Press, 2012): 70-81.

[9] Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917,” 81.  

[10] Malcolm Goldstein, Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 264.  

[11] Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade: Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Conundrum of the Replica (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018): 88.

[12]  Francis Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Readymade Press, 2012): 76.

[13] Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost, 76. 

[14]  Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade, 96.

[15]Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost, 77. 

[16] Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade, 148. 

[17] Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1964). 

[18] Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade, 262.

[19] Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade, 164.  

[20] Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 46. 

[21] Bradley Bailey, “Before, During, and Beyond the Brillo Box: The Impact of Pop on the 1964 Edition of Duchamp’s Readymades,” Visual Resources, 34:3-4, 348.

[22] Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: Of de kunst om niet in de herhaling te vallen (Gent: Ludion, 1999): 258.

[23] Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade, 277.

[24] Souren Melikian, “Art’s Bull Market” in International Herald Tribune (The New York Times), 19 november 1999. <https://www-nytimes-com.proxy.uba.uva.nl/1999/11/19/style/IHT-arts-bull-market.html?searchResultPosition=1>.