fig 17 fig 18
At a cultural level, the awareness of traditional fine art can also create a meme. In 2016, an image of popular singer Justin Bieber being choked became a meme, not just because of the humor the audience found in his being choked.( Fig. 21) Instead, many pointed out that there were a number of similarities to traditional Renaissance paintings. The lighting, golden ratio composition, color scheme, among other things contribute to the overal aesthettic of Renaissance art such as the Lamentation Over The Dead Christ by Tintoretto, which was created in 1590.( Fig. 20) A screen capture of a tweet pointing out the similarity of the photo to Renaissance imagery appeared on Tumblr. Tumblr users are known for analyzing the humor and background to a meme, sometimes ironically, sometimes as a meme itself, and sometimes out of pure intrigue. Fig. 19 is a screen capture of the thread following the tweet. The users range from legitimate analyzation, to the continued generation of memes.
User bibliofilariidae contributed a well known meme of creating a caption to the image in the same way a museum would. Although in this case the context is very literal, the meme of museum captioning often is used when denoting that an image or portion of text, often a screen capture from other social media, is art. This is frequently used with insults that are so good they are to be considered art.
As the meme of Bieber being choked rose to popularity, people made parodies using filters to make the image more painterly, phtoshopping Bieber and others in the photo’ s faces over famous art, such as Leonardo DaVinci’ s The Last Supper.
10 | Part One: Early Memes