Memesthetics

In the 21st century, art has become a strange business, even stranger than in the previous century. The Internet, new technologies and social media have invaded our visual universe with GIFs, photoshopping and all kinds of appropriations. Trolls, YouTubers and Instagrammers leave us a set of practices and aesthetics that recall the precepts of historical avant-gardes, distorted in a playful, bizarre, wild and uninhibited. How the art that is still found in museums and galleries did he react to this questioning? And above all, what would happen if the art history textbooks of the future listed not the works of some artistic geniuses of the 19th century, but the memes of all these anonymous users hiding behind improbable pseudonyms? Memesthetics is the first book to comprehensively map the relations between visual arts and digital culture since the beginning of the 2000s. Tracing the path that took us “from Duchamp to TikTok”, Valentina Tanni defines the contours of a contemporary landscape as exciting that worrying.