Go Bananas: Meme Culture Reflection
The Guerrilla Girls are an activist group initially concerned with the improving the representation of women and minorities in the art world, though they have since expanded into other causes. Things like voter representation, immigration, and proving the eternal immutable fact that Donald Trump is a terrible person. They hit all the warm fuzzy bits of my own political identity in essence and they do it through eye catching and distinct art with a cool anonymous activist edge. Exactly the sort of antics I am hoping to get up to in my free time when I am older. Therefore, it is frustrating to me that despite their prestige, their influence, and their recognized presence, that there has been so little progress on the issues they stand for both in the United States and abroad. For comparison, 30 years ago the Metropolitan had one show highlighting a female artist. Flashforward, they had one show in 2016. Particularly in the high art world this is pretty easy to blame on the infrastructure built into art. Rich money gets to keep making a lot of money through high art in a complicated balancing act of collecting, well timed donating, and reputation building for particular artists. As long as they are all in relative agreement of what art is valuable, they can keep and maintain power, and the easiest way to do so is to sway the public mind to look at art those in power have already deemed valuable and push them to look at that. In a war of memes, memes being the viral ideas spread and shared across minds in this instance, the Guerrilla girls are fighting against centuries of carefully developed powers that be. Thirty years is a long time, but it regrettably will likely take more to change people’s ideas on the history of art. In choosing between the truths of what high art and the history of art should be, it is easier for the powers that be to keep the status que. It is only by highlighting the arguments and spreading a popular counter argument for what kinds of art can be represented in the world that this can hope to change, and it is a argument the Guerrilla Girls continue to push.
