The debate around which forms can adequately be considered ‘art’ has been ongoing for millenia, most saliently by Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 piece ‘Funeral’, a readymade urinal that was rejected from an art exhibition which claimed to accept all works.

As the lines between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms become increasingly blurred and flattened online, I’d like to research a form of contemporary collage-making that is often overlooked in discussions about contemporary art: memes.

While the ontological definition of what a meme is has been widely contested for decades (from Dawkins to Shifman to Galip), it is clear that memes exert significant and diverse influence on culture, politics, and social dynamics. Despite this, there are very few legitimate academic pathways offered to studying memes, making it all the more important to research.

My hypothesis is that memes can (and should) be considered art forms. I’m interested in using DH methods (ie. archives, cultural analytics) to investigate the things memes can reveal about digital culture and human nature in general by limitlessly exploring the research question, ‘Should a Meme be Considered a Form of Art?’