By Meredith Whitfield, University of Manchester, UK 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.

1. Art Memes’
New Online Literacies and
Modes of Everyday
Engagement
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2. Classical Art Memes

3. methodology

4. Classical Art Memesaccounts

5. Classical Art Memesverifying source material

6. what is an art meme?

7. image macros

8. expressive portraiture

9. operative signs

10. “operability”

11. memetic literacies

12. Intertext in Christina’s World

13. Intertext in Christina’s World

14. Intertext in Christina’s World

15. the memetic mode

16. art meme; mainstream meme; emoji

17. meming in situ

18. museum meming beyond art

19. meme potentials
open collections and meming
templating visitor interaction
humor as entry point

20. get in touch
mwhitfield2@fieldmuseum.org
@hashtagmsw