memes and the protocol aesthetic
Art has left the building. Literally.
The museum and the white cube of the gallery no longer hold the monopoly on cultural legitimacy; in fact, they haven't for decades.
Through Modernism, specifically abstract expressionism in the 1950s, art became elitist. Painting was pushed to it’s extremes and created a widening gap between the general public and their perception - and value, of art. While elevated in academia, modern art became an offence to many. “My kid could do that” was the critical weapon of choice. It was not incorrect.
At the same time, televisions were becoming common. In the 60s, advertising began to displace art. Ads redefined what culture looked like through the medium of its time, TV. Advertising became the dominant aesthetic and communicative force of the modernist age. It not only shaped consumer behavior but also became the central medium through which people experienced beauty, identity and aspiration. That continued until the Internet era.
Meanwhile, back in the galleries, art became conceptual. Art became the idea. Art became process. Art became event, or happening. The value of artistic production shifted from art as object to process - a precursor to the process of production soon to arrive in the digital age.
As the Internet began to displace TV, memes became the dominant aesthetic object of our time. And with it, an entire new set of rules about storytelling and authorship.
This essay explores how memes represent the recalibration of art: chaotic, collective and alive.
Memes aren’t content so much as they are systems. Memes are structures for cultural behavior. A meme format acts much like an open API - something that is forkable, remixable, upgradable or downgradable. It governs participation more than it represents meaning. This is the essence of the protocol aesthetic: art not as object, but as process (even in the consideration of conceptual and post-modern art). Where traditional art aesthetics emphasized completed works, events or happenings, memes function as cultural operating systems.
This aligns with Web3-native thinking, where culture is not owned but realized across distributed agents and individuals. In this logic, a meme is closer to a protocol than a painting. It invites iteration, not admiration. It is participatory by design.
Many memes begin in humor, but their staying power derives from symbolic depth. Characters like Pepe aren’t simply internet jokes - they are fragments of a collective ideology. They compress complex emotional and political currents into signals. Like mythic archetypes, they offer a grammar of digital identity and affect.
Memes are the folk tales of the feed, but they don’t explain the past. They enable the present. They encode economic despair, algorithmic confusion, platform fatigue, and ideological drift. Their power lies in their ability to become lore.
Memes are intertextual by default. Their meaning derives not from originality, but from reference. In this, they share a connection with hip-hop, which emerged as a sonic collage of breakbeats, samples, and callbacks. Both are remix cultures, thriving on the tension between familiarity and invention.
Just as hip-hop tracks are layered with older recordings, samples and “inside” content, memes stack references from film, games, politics, and internet history. The very architecture of the early Internet - the hyperlink - mirrored this logic. Intertextuality was not only a stylistic choice; it was the structure of thought. The mainstream arrival of hip hop and the Internet in the mid 1990’s is no coincidence.
Memes extend from media objects into rituals. Participating in a meme format, reposting a shitpost, or remixing a viral image are acts of digital rites. They signal belonging, belief and alignment. They mark one’s place in a subculture, a worldview, or an affective state.
As religious institutions lose cultural authority, memes have filled the vacuum by providing symbolic scaffolding. They are rituals in a world that has lost its priests.
In a post-truth, hyper-mediated world, semantic clarity is scarce. But memes survive because they operate at the level of feeling. They are affective (vs effective) signal carriers: short bursts of irony, absurdity, or grief that bypass cognition and hit the gut.
Where traditional communication aims for clarity, memes thrive in ambiguity. Their success is often due to their emotional rather than informational payload. In this sense, memes are emotional data packets in an age of traditional narrative exhaustion.
Web3 introduces the possibility of owning memes via NFTs and tokenization. But this collides with the meme’s core logic as they thrive on ubiquity, not scarcity. A meme gains power the more it is remixed, reused, and reappropriated.
This tension between the cultural logic of open-source remix and the economic logic of ownership is unresolved. Memecoins attempt to bridge this divide by embedding community into the meme’s value. But an important question remains: can you own a vibe?
Envisioning memes as art’s endpoint is limited in thinking; rather, they are art’s escape velocity. They mark art’s migration from the bounds of the gallery walls and re-entry into the bloodstream of culture. Messy, unstable, uncredited, but vital.
Today, art lives in content threads, remix rituals, social networks, ironic remediation, DMs and onchain. It is ephemeral but charged. Fast but deep. Distilled. A new methodology of art is embodied here collective, recursive and alive.
