The EXPECTATION vs. REALITY memes are already a classic. In their millions of versions, they comment on bike lanes, restorations, weddings, chocolate pies, presidents, acrobatics, swimming pools, aesthetic procedures, jobs… In doing so, they remind us that reality is not superior to other regimes of existence (in the world of expectation, for example, this text would certainly be less boring). Therefore, the crux of the question must be faced: “What would become of reality without fiction?”
Hence we have been living, in the platbands of pandemic neoliberalism, the waning of the heroism of the Real, once symbolically sustained with its pompous capitalization. Ailing long before the coronavirus, the traditional and portentous Real has withered out of shame, impotence and sheer cowardice. A far cry from its previous roars, as victorious as they were masculinist, its trembling voice is now barely articulate. Little by little it loses sovereignty over its own realm, the reality.
While hopefully inhabiting the world of expectations as we wait for universal vaccination, the truth is that, paraphrasing Oiticica, “by fiction we live.” The fictional has never been so real: “Make Orwell fiction again”, demanded a meme I came across, evoking a time when we could still take refuge in the fanciful distinction between fiction and reality.
It was in the midst of such dystopia that, on July 31, 2020, yet another Instagram profile was created, @newmemeseum. Emulating the visual identity of its cousin, the New Museum of New York, whose heroic mission-cum-slogan is no less than “New Art, New Ideas”- yes, just like that, entirely capitalized - in one of its first posts the Brazilian meme-producing version of the “new museum” soon set the embarrassed tone of its self-image through the ethnographic words of the performance diva in the film
The Space in Between — Marina Abramovic and Brazil (2016): “We are here, basically in the middle of nowhere. It’s Brazil.”
With an embarrassing opening in which João de Deus, later sentenced to 60 years in prison for sex crimes, recognizes Abramovic’s mediumship, the film is an almost vexatious ethnographic expedition for the sake of the artist’s spiritual interests, a journey in which she seeks to cure herself and better understand her “mission”: “How can I help increase awareness through art?”
The New Memeseum, in a different approach and from its downgraded status of “nothingness”, without even a thousandth part of the Serbian artist’s missionary heroism, busies itself with the less glorious task of addressing that which, in art, greatly besets or seduces our conscience. There’s not much to be proud of after all.
During the pandemic, over and above the general distress experienced by and hurled upon artists, museum professionals were fired, lost their wages and faced even more severe processes of insecurity. While the art market continues selling (and, in some cases, even more than before), several museums have closed down, never to open again; others have failed to raise funds. It is noteworthy that, besides the socioeconomic tragedy of our institutions, for the most part they have done little to directly engage in the fight against the coronavirus or the ruling proto-fascism.
“Nothing new under the sun”, some might say.
In the old and tragically familiar reality of the social field of art, of the cultural industry or of the museum world, the New Memeseum comes not with the messianic and civilizing urge to transform it, but to show up and mock that which, in art or on its behalf, is not a reason for acclaim, but for individual, public and generalized embarrassment. By jeering at us, the instagramic museum ridicules itself not in terms of the now elderly “institutional criticism,” but from the ethical-political perspective of memes.
Anonymous, the museum’s profile produces, shares and recreates memes whose main subject matter is art itself - its sociopolitical dynamics, its ethical crossroads, its economic inequality, its structural racism, its shattered subjectivities, the sexism that governs it or the cultural feudalism reinvented within it, among other themes. Thus, it is part of the intense flow of the world’s meme factory — Brazil — further spiraling the circularity of the typical reappropriations of digital cultures.
Those who follow the daily routine of the museum will soon find that its audiences are also among its institutors. Transformed into a space for public debate, the posted comments demand content, point out deficiencies, disagree with each other, criticize the views proposed by the institution (not to mention how fruitful the museum’s office of the ombudsperson must be via DM). If laughing is a political act, memefication empowers it.
Operating with data from reality yet without the claims of the Real, the meme is an enthusiast of fiction. Not of fictionalization as superreality, but precisely of that insightful inflection that, acting from within what we recognize as real, addresses its signs without committing to revere its powers, sovereignties or sacralizations. Thus, it develops alternative intelligibilities to understand, question and recreate them: “The real must be fictionalized to be thought of” (Jacques Rancière). In this sense, memefying the museum means rearranging its terms, fictionalizing them so that, in this translation, they may be glimpsed from other perspectives.
The memes that make us laugh at museums, at their agents, policies and representations, will not change them, but may contribute to emancipate us from their fictions of neutrality, sacredness, legitimacy, exceptionality, freedom, among many others. It is the gesture of “fighting fiction with fiction”, in the words of Karl Ove Knausgård. The same fictionalizing weapons are used not to renew our vows and beliefs in the dying Real and its heroic narratives, but to strip it of the ambition to be the protagonist in the formulation of meanings and values for the countless, complex and elusive ways of existing.
Fictions beyond expectation and reality.
