Doge In Contemporary Art

By Alexandra Debler

I was recently looking at my transcript to make sure I had all the requirements to graduate (though doing so while already part way through my final semester was not my proudest moment) when I saw that I had taken Contemporary Art since 1960. I had no recollection of taking this class, and I imagine my frown when I saw it sitting on my transcript was so deep it would have been considered even too dramatic for a sitcom. Turns out I took it during COVID as an online course and probably slept through the majority of the lectures. But as I thought about it, I had this nagging image of doge in the back of my mind that I couldn’t shake. Of course, the logical thing to do was obsessively sort through my essays from that year on google drive to find out why in the hell I associated a viral meme of a shiba inu with a class about contemporary art.

Thus, here it is, a bastardized version of my final essay for that class where I deconstruct a quite serious essay into a piece centered around one of 2013’s most famous memes. 

A woman named Hito Steyerl wrote an essay titled “In Defense of the Poor Image,” where she defined a poor image as “a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.” …So what else would one associate with that definition other than what our lovely internet culture calls crispy memes? By her definition of poor image, it is meant to be low quality and easily accessible. Said image was redownloaded or reedited repeatedly until it reached the low resolution and quality that categorizes it as a ‘poor image’ like doge above. One can reshare many things, but in the age of instagram and tiktok, where image quality is frankly nerfed to shit, it seems memes are the most prevalent example of this idea, with the need to edit them more than other images to include the punchlines. 

Hito Steyerl argues that the poor image reflects the destructive tendencies of today’s culture. A few decades ago, experimental and essayistic cinema began to fade from daily life as it was becoming too expensive to keep them running, and they were deemed too insignificant to continue airing. The destructive tendencies of today’s culture lie in the ideology of ‘culture as commodity’, and ‘the commercialization of cinema’. By forcing culture into being a consumable product, it is subjugated to the throws of capitalism and thus not being seen as something worthy or valuable, but rather as a monetary gain or consumable option. Essentially, images boil down to something that must have profit in our lovely tiny bubble of capitalism - so the more you scroll on instagram with crappy images of fire elmo and bad quality videos of Hailey Bieber and Kylie Jenner talking about eyebrows (like the good little journalist I am I cannot resist some piping hot internet tea) the more money Meta makes. So, these images are profitable.

Despite seeing the poor image as a reflection of the destructive tendencies of today’s culture, Steyerl also locates an emancipatory political potential in the poor image. In her essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image”, she states that “the imperfect cinema is one that strives to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience, and author. It insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic.” Imperfect cinema is meant to be greater than divisions between peoples. It is meant to merge all aspects of humanity together and blur all things to show what is simply humanity, sans our self-constructed borders. Thus, Memes bring us together! Collective simping over Shrek can cure inequality.

At its core, this was an essay about memes and the internet. I’ll admit, the internet kind of sucks - like, who else has a hard time listening to their friend’s talk without a miscellaneous Subway Surfers or Minecraft video playing in the background? Do we still have the same attention span that we used to? Is Tiktok stealing our data, like the thirst trap I made of Peeta Mallark that I never posted? I recently read an article that young kids have terrible peripheral vision compared to the amazing, totally superior Elder Gen Zs like myself. Like, what is this stuff doing to us? 

So yes, I admit there’s a lot of issues within the internet as a whole, from body images to cancel culture. Despite this, it still offers us a beautiful connection across places and different types of people.  Poor images and imperfect cinema is a place of new agendas. With many voices intertwined, poor images can become popular images, gain speed, and thus show the mindset of the huge groups of people that have taken the time to recreate them. A poor image may lose its quality, but it only becomes richer with meaning and content.

Hence, I hope you think about me and this essay the next time you’re doom scrolling on the toilet, sending your friends low quality reposts of tiktoks on instagram reels. To conclude, because I know you are all dying to know, I did get an A on that essay, so my middle aged, PhD educated professor must have enjoyed what was essentially a meme of his assignment.