Blog Post #6 - Memes and Art - The Pepper Spray Cop goes Viral

     Art is world perspective of a person who uses his or her imagination and creativity to develop an idea in an artwork such as painting, statue, building, or drawing.  Theses days a new tendency called Memes is very popular in the Interned. Memes   can be art because this promotes social causes and express the feeling of the person who made these. However memes are not art because they are not original.

     Some memes can support social causes and have a big impact in our society. However, memes are not unique. They are collage. These memes regularly are a copy of very famous paintings with a repetition of other popular web image. For example, last week, different memes were on Facebook as people reactions when a police officer pepper sprayed some students protesting on the UC Davis campus.  The most relevant memes to support the pacifist protest were the image of the police officer pepper sprayed on some of the most famous paintings during the Renacisse. Paintings like Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte    and Andrew Wyeth’s   Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth suffer alteration in the imagines. Memes can influence in people social causes but they are bad imitation of the most famous painting.

     In addition, copying the image of an important painting is a type of plagiarism. People recreate the same painting with an extra image to make it looks different. This is like to copy the song’ lyrics   and change some of the words of the song. The song has the same rhyme, but the lyrics change a little. The memes has the same fond and the same characteristic of the original piece but something is adding or changing.

     Other memes can be offensive and destroy people image. For example, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are the media which people use to share the memes. For more than two months, around the world, people have been shared memes of a teen name Rebecca Black who was criticize because of her song Friday.  People made fun of her and she got depressed. Memes affected other when people don have conscience of their acts.

     In conclusion, memes don’t show imagination, they are copy of other works, and they are offensives.  Memes can be a good media to express feeling when people uses their own imagination and do not copy others’ artworks.