Dina Climatiano

Creativity Challenge, Day 15:

Today’s offering is brought to you by Apollo, who’s cute, but has no sense of morning etiquette.

This prompted several questions: Are memes art? What counts as a meme, anyway?

Let’s start with the first question. It seems that despite professional artists often taking offense to the idea, memes are considered art according to most definitions. They’re used to communicate emotions and ideas, they’re symbolic, there is an aesthetic component… They may be lazy and derivative, but they are creative. If you ask me, at this point in human history, all art is derivative. And that’s just fine.

So I’m counting the image of Apollo waking me up at the crack of dawn as a valid entry for this month’s creative challenge. I’m sure cat parents (or any parent, really) can relate.

And anyway, since when do I have standards for what I consider creative? I turned tidying my desk into a creative endeavor (and I still stand by it! Did it again today because the art supplies are piling up… The system works!).

But I digress.

After spending several hours scrolling through my phone looking for other photos I can potentially turn into memes (unsurprisingly most of them are of my very meme-able cats), I started questioning what even makes a meme.

This definition proved more elusive. It seems that a meme is not really a meme unless it spreads from person to person and is being used. The memes I thought of are… Niche, to say the least. And I don’t really want to be viral, I think that’s a lot of work. But I don’t hate the idea of having an arsenal of custom memes based on my own images that convey my exact state of mind and aesthetic preferences.

So that’s what I’m going to do 🙂