Y Tho: Art Memes’ New Online Literacies and Modes of Everyday Engagement

Paper
Meredith Whitfield, Field Museum, USA

Published paper: Y tho: Art memes’ new online literacies and modes of everyday engagement

Over four million people online participate in making and using Internet memes of art: they interact with works of art, many of them museum objects, as part of their everyday lives, without institutional prompting. This session presents research on six months worth of art memes, providing an introduction to the practice and discussion of meme literacies, as well as a framework to understand meming as a mode of engagement with art.

The session also theorizes methods museums might use to observe and understand this practice as part of new engagement strategies and kindles discussion about how templated interactions prompt participation.

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