#classcontentmeme

This is my Class Content meme. I made this meme to reflect the disinterested view of art in a humorous way. I find it an interesting concept that art should be beautiful in order to be art, especially as we review memes to be a form of art. I was inspired by the project itself in my execution of this meme and though it took a bit of a steep learning curve with Photoshop I enjoyed completing this section of the project.

(via Evil Kermit Meme) Class Content Meme: For this meme I was inspired by the values addressed in Guy Debord’s, “Society of the Spectacle”. One particular quote in the passage stood out to me, “Images influence our lives and beliefs on a daily basis; advertising manufactures new desires and aspirations”. I chose the evil kermit meme to portray the media’s dark agenda on young girls. Instead of making women feel beautiful in their own skin, beauty advertisements advocate that women need makeup to be beautiful. These views that advertisements portray manufacture the way women feel about themselves, as Debord said in his article. 

Here we have our class content meme with none other than Rushdie himself. In his analysis of Orwell’s “Inside the Whale”, Rushdie states that it is important to use art and literature in political ways so that more people can understand it and therefore have change come up from that. The meme comes from Top Gear, a car show held by British people so it seemed fit.

This meme is from the show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” which is ironic considering Debord’s description of the spectacle and the way it forces us to compare ourselves against the backdrop of society’s valuation of status, money, etc. "Debord describes the spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses...It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser...The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments, while encouraging us to focus on appearances. For Debord, this constituted an unacceptable “degradation” of our lives” (Morgan and Purje).

The scroll of truth meme takes the form of exposing an inconvenient truth which the discoverer does not want to know and in turn throws the scroll away. I was inspired by Guy Debord’s quote, “There remains nothing, in culture or nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted according to the means and interests of modern industry” and how distressingly truthful it is in explaining the state of society today. It is impossible to escape the grasp of capitalism living in the United States. It is equally as difficult to admit this truth, so much so that most people would rather cast it aside in frustration. 

I chose a quotation by John Berger in chapter 1 of his book Ways of Seeing.  The quotation speaks to how perception can be altered by prior beliefs or misconceptions.  The image I chose to represent this notion involves the “Flat Earth” theory in which people try to make sense of real life experience (what they see) based on a misconstrued belief (the Earth is flat).