Memes and Activism
Sometimes, an artist uses its art to defend a cause close to his heart through the 10 different types of art, be it architecture, sculpture, visual art, music, literature, performing art, cinema, mediatic art, comics books or even video games.
The author tries to use his power and influence to express his feelings to denounce major social issues such as wars, inequalities, or more recently, environmental issues.
Nowadays, we don’t need to be an artist to protest and be an activist. With the birth of social media, anyone can be politically or socially engaged. We can like, share or even post contents which will be spread to the mass. In a sense, social media can be more powerful and efficient to reach people than most of the artworks out there.
Indeed, not everyone is interested in painting, literature or even sculpture while nowadays, pretty much anyone has a social media account
So what about the new visual art coming from social media, Memes.
We can make the assumption that an art form living and spreading through social media is very powerful.
Indeed, it can reach a lot of people and as such, be very efficient to spread a message.
But can we really use memes as a mean of activism?
An ecologically engaged meme using an Avenger reference to denounce the water pollution.
A politically engaged meme denouncing the immigration policy of Donald Trump.
As we can see with both of the examples above, memes can be used as a form of protest.
Is it really efficient though?
The main problem is, with a humour-based content, memes are not made to be serious or alarming.
They are created to make people laugh and smile.
Although they can still be used to raise awareness and talk about a specific problem, the fact that they make fun of said problem might encourage people to joke about it and thus, tone down the issue, and have the opposite effect.
So what do you guys think?
Can memes or any kind of other art forms use humour to denounce a social or environmental issue without losing the seriousness of the situation?
Alexandre