Jan 29, 2014
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Blog Entry #2: Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
Hunter Frigault
Jeff Preston
MIT 3652
January 28th, 2014
The meme that I have chosen to write about for my second meme analysis blog post is the use of clip art and the Comic Sans font to recreate famous pictures. No picture is off limits however, most of the clip art recreations are based on the covers of CDs, DVD boxes and video game boxes. There are not any popular examples of the meme due to the vast selection available for remaking in the clip art style, however there have been instances when video game covers or DVD boxes are showcased in photo albums.
The origin of the meme, according to the website Know Your Meme, began on Tumblr when the blog “Clip Art Covers” was launched on December 13th, 2011 (Know Your Meme, par. 2) with the most recent post made on July of 2013. When the blog launched, it primarily featured album covers recreated with clip art and the first post was a recreation of the cover of the classic Nirvana album Nevermind (Know Your Meme, par. 2). Shortly afterwards, threads began to sprout up on Facepunch, Kotaku, NeoGaf and Reddit asking users to submit their own clip art covers.
This meme can be seen as beneficial because it turns the images that we are bombarded with daily on their heads. If these (sometimes iconic) images can be recreated in such a childish manner, then what does that say about the capacity of human creativity? We might be forced face the fact that our artistic ideals revolve around borrowing, stealing and slightly altering pre-existing images to create new ones instead of attempting to create new images from scratch.
One extremely negative aspect of the meme is that people reward the inherent mediocre quality of these recreations. If people see that they can get easy laugh for minimal effort, then less effort may be put into creating new works of art. This meme is essentially a real life example of a person’s ability to recognize a person, place or thing through the use of symbols and icons. While this is a good skill to possess, it does nothing to challenge the mind of a person who is viewing these clip art monstrosities.
Ultimately, I find myself in the minority when it comes to finding this meme funny. Taking clip art and making something that looks like a five year old drew is something that falls outside the circle that I call my sense of humour. I prefer well thought out jokes or pictures that come out of the need to make someone laugh. Taking some great illustration or iconic photograph and desensitizing it takes away everything that was great about it in the first place. Maybe I am being overly negative towards this meme but I think there are far better things to do with your time than to recreate the cover of Pokemon Blue with a terrible clip art drawing of a turtle.
Works Cited
“Clip Art Covers”. Know Your Meme. Cheezburger, n.p. Web. 28 Jan 2014.
Clip art and comic sans album covers are great, aren't they?
