Trendswatch: Don’t mind meme - Museums Association

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Trendswatch: Don’t mind meme

Museums are discovering the benefits of this popular medium, says Jasper Hart
Jasper Hart
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Museums have been working hard to engage audiences online for years, so it is no surprise that many embraced Museum Meme Day in the summer. Using the hashtag #MusMeme, museums, libraries and galleries of all shapes and sizes weighed in with a range of humorously captioned images on 22 August.
So what is a meme? According to Wikipedia, “an internet meme, commonly known as just a meme, is an activity, concept, catchphrase or piece of media that spreads, often as mimicry or for humorous purposes, from person to person via the internet”.
For museums, memes seem to work well because they build on public interest in historical artefacts and images. This has been reflected in a growing online audience for ideas such as classical art memes (@classicalartmemes) and tabloid art history
(@TabloidArtHist), which finds parallels between the latest celebrity paparazzi snaps and works from art history.
This trend for museum memes received a boost in April when Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life (Merl) tweeted an old photograph of a sizeable ram with the caption, “look at this absolute unit”, which refers to an earlier meme that used this phrase to describe something unusually large.
Merl’s tweet, which attracted more than 30,000 retweets and 109,000 favourites, led to a five-fold rise in Merl’s Twitter followers. This has emboldened other venues to follow in its footsteps, as shown by August’s celebration of museum memes.
Some in the sector are concerned that tweeting memes can make venues look like they are pandering to an audience ready to pounce on content that tries too hard. But others see it as a reflection of their increased accessibility and openness.
Russell Dornan, the digital producer at the recently opened V&A Dundee (see review, p56), says it is part of communicating the human side of a museum to its visitors.
“I’m a human being, I have a personality and that will feed into my work,” Dornan says. “Just because I’m running social media for an organisation doesn’t mean I leave all that behind. If I did, it would be incredibly boring. Also, why shouldn’t museums speak the same language as anyone else?”
Dornan, a former web editor at the Wellcome Collection, found that the London venue’s eccentric reputation lent itself naturally to social media.
“The Wellcome has some weird stuff going back hundreds of years, such as pictures of Noah’s Ark with unicorns in it and things that play into social media,” Dornan says.

The most popular of Dornan’s Wellcome Collection tweets was an image of a urinating orange demon, in reference to the Donald Trump golden shower scandal happening at the time, with a caption using a tone of voice not dissimilar to the US president’s Twitter account. Another used a picture of a demon from the same book that Dornan jokingly renamed a “Covfefe”.
But the extent to which staff can send provocative memes is linked to the museum they work for. Dornan has had to rein himself in at V&A Dundee, which is aiming for a different audience and tone of voice both online and offline.
Memes aren’t just being used as promotional tools – some have become exhibits in their own right. People are realising that for all their silliness, memes play an important role in societal fabric. New York’s Museum of the Moving Image recently co-hosted an exhibition titled Two Decades of Memes in partnership with Know Your Meme, a website that documents viral internet phenomena.
This critical eye has extended to academia as well. The University of Cambridge ran a short course in the summer of 2017 entitled Understanding and Analysis of the Meme Revolution, and a similar course has started at Brown University in the US.
Given that memes are part of the ever-evolving online frontier, they merit discussion as a facet of culture in their own right. And as they become more pervasive, we can expect to see more and more museums embracing them.

Jasper Hart is a freelance writer

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