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memes--the "dank memes" to which you refer--aren't showing up in art museums yet, but
we can't say what the future holds.
These little gags can be cranked out with
minimal effort by anybody with Photoshop, so they don't require a lot of effort to make. Of
course, "effort" is far from an absolute requirement of artistic merit. Artists from
Marcel Duchamp ("L.H.O.O.Q.") to Andy Warhol (who infamously autographed thousands of
soup cans and resold them at a 1,000% mark-up) have produced "masterpieces" with even
less effort.
It's worth considering that great art challenges its audience's
cultural assumptions, whereas bad art reinforces them. The merit of dank memes, by contrast, is
measured almost exclusively by how much we agree with what they say, quite the opposite of other
kinds of modern fine art. Even a wonderfully, laboriously crafted meme that supports a noxious
viewpoint is soundly regarded as a "fail." By this criterion alone, dank memes are not
a valid art form. Yet.
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