Monday, November 21, 2011

Blog Post #6 - Memes and Art - The Pepper Spray Cop goes Viral

Recently, a police officer pepper sprayed some students protesting on the UC Davis campus.  People seized the image and added it to many well-known works of art.  For example:



This website contains more images:
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/casually-pepper-spray-everything-cop

Here is a link to a news article with the original video of the officer pepper spraying the students:
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-21/news/30424391_1_pepper-spray-protesters-university-police

Discussion:

  1. Is this art?  Why or why not?
  2. What message do you think the creators of these images has?  Is this "art for social causes"?
  3. Is using a meme and re-creating art images in different ways a type of plagiarism?  Or is it the creation of new artworks?
  4. Do you know other Internet memes?  Can you show images of them?
**extra credit points if you can name the original artworks above**

**This Blog Post will be due by Monday, Nov. 28**
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    2 comments:

    1. Doctor XNovember 22, 2011 at 5:33 AM

      I love it! I'm going to share this on FB, if you don't mind...

      ReplyDelete
    2. Professor Rebekah JohnsonNovember 22, 2011 at 11:04 AM

      I don't mind at all!

      We had a great discussion today in class about the protests going on, the rhetoric being used, and the memes emerging from it, all to point my students to considering whether the memes are art and what the creators' messages are in making them.

      -Rebekah

      ReplyDelete

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