As a dissident facing the stark binary of the edgy flippancy of the Postmodernists and creaky archaisms of the ultra-conservatives, one sometimes despairs, not least because the critiques from both sides are valid.
Yet if we set aside aesthetic questions, reactionary attitudes and artivism should be a perfect fit. A rejection of the legitimacy of the extant status quo has always been fertile ground for dissident avant-garde art. Artivists you will have heard of (Banksy, Tania Bruguera, Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramovich, Guerilla Girls) claim to be rebellious but are not. What if there were artivists who actually overturned assumptions and questioned the politically convenient pablum we are fed?
One area where Postmodern traditionalists have adopted a powerfully effective form of artivism is in memes. The meme is the quintessential reactionary form. It allows pithy expression of known truths in a manner that is punchy, mordant, memorable, and subversive of establishment bromides. A well-crafted reactionary meme delights the same way a lampoon does, by pricking the pompous bombast of egalitarians and sly disingenuousness of nudge-policy authoritarians. The meme works when it rings true and uses few words – sometimes no words at all – and that rests on what the maker and consumer instinctively know. The meme can use a shorthand of established vocabulary (verbal and visual) and adopt the opponent’s cultural imagery.
https://im1776.com/2022/10/06/what-is-artivism/
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