What’s in a Meme? Interview with Museum Director Alfredo Cramerotti

Alfredo Cramerotti, Director of Media Majlis Museum in Doha, discusses their new exhibition on the power of Memes and internet culture, featuring the work of Mauro C. Martinez.

Unit: How would you describe the exhibition? It sounds engaging from just hearing the title!

Alfredo Cramerotti: Memememememe, which is meme three times, or me six times, is a critical take on meme culture. It’s not about showing funny memes but rather takes the temperature of what a meme is, and what meme culture has morphed into. It’s an interesting universal language to dive into, because everyone enjoys and shares memes, but there is something more profound happening here than simple instants of entertainment. That’s why we wanted to take many critical views - political, sociological, as well as artistic - to fully understand the cultural power of a meme and their power as a tool for social movement.

U: How have you structured the exhibition, and approached the idea of analysing Meme culture?

AC: We have found that human beings are obsessed with measuring things, so to discuss what a meme is we also used metaphors of measurement. We’ve structured the exhibition into four areas. Mass, Length, Time and Volume. But how do you measure the length of a meme, or its weight, or its duration?

Mass and Length can equate to breadth of authorship and audience reach, exploring why some memes traverse global distances whereas some fail to propagate. Time and Volume, for example, engage the endurance and impact of memes. We have examined content that is time-specific compared to legacy memes that resurface in new contemporary settings.

We have also adopted, let’s say as display strategy, the idea of the laundromat. Somehow memes and meme culture have been used quite a lot in terms of “the-washing-of-things”, it could be green washing, sport washing, white washing, etc. And so a lot came out in the wash! Our academic research unlocked quite a lot of things, including how memes are used in that way. And equally, our academic research shows how memes are often not generated for but adopted by activists and social movements.

So academically interrogating a subject matter impacts a number of things that we, as exhibition organiser and curators, can take and articulate in different ways, maybe commissioning new artworks or media productions from artists who have worked in that field.

U: How does the subject matter stand up to that level of scrutiny? Memes can be seen as non-academic, more humorous or lightweight in a sense, even flippant. But did you make some surprising discoveries in your questioning of the material?

AC: Every subject matter or theme that we take up as a museum we run through an academic lens and based on what is unpacked we then commission works from different people, or bring in different institutions to loan or borrow objects, for instance. That’s our modus operandi, and why it takes quite some time to put together an exhibition.

We embrace the core academic values of our research at Northwestern Qatar, of which the Media Majlis museum is a part. We’ve got all that wonderful learning at our disposal, with amazing faculty, alumni, and students. We are actually in a very privileged position in that sense; it’s wonderful.

One of the commissions we made for the exhibition is seen along the whole of what we call the North Wall - a 10 metre digital, interactive wall. In collaboration with researchers from the university, we mapped memes from the global South - so Latin and South America, Africa and South East Asia which is actually the global majority. So we can see that most memes are produced and circulated in a south-to-south network. The most interesting aspects of this map are that you can see not only the different aesthetics and languages of memes, but also how memes are used and abused in different contexts, a lot of which are political.

U: Were Mauro C. Martinez’s two paintings in Memememememe commissioned?

AC: Yes, our curators, Jack Taylor and Amal Ali, came across his work and after some initial discussions he produced two great paintings that come from very specific contexts. One is of a make-shift desk, improvised with cardboard and tape as something on which to play Minecraft. The other is a depiction of a type of event I remember very well actually, a LAN party - a hackathon-esque environment where people crowd together with hardcore hardware, these almost indestructible PCs, to game multiplayer together. They’re hanging in hammocks and on the floor in bean bags. I think one guy is taped to the ceiling. This kind of environment was very popular in the ‘90s, when net art flourished.

So the idea behind both environments is to take the internet not as a distribution channel for your work but as a raw material. The people who played with code and who came together to experiment with new technologies - we didn’t call them artists at that time, but they were aware an audience or a user would interact with their discoveries later on.

Personally, I see the most fundamental element of digital culture is that you learn by doing. By doing you learn more, you then share your new knowledge, and you go ahead with that sort of attitude, and this is a great thing. I think Mauro’s two paintings in the exhibition really pinned down that fundamental understanding. In that ‘90s period all this technology was coming out, and it’s completely cutting edge, but it’s also completely DIY.

U: At what point did this begin to affect the artworld, and how have you tracked the transfer of visual information from the days of the early internet to the current culture of viral memes?

AC: This is a fundamental point, because at that time the art world was completely cut off from the digital world. Those doing net art, or organising LAN parties, or coding, all had a specific knowledge which an artist wouldn’t.

Then slowly, through blockchain technology for instance, this alternative idea of using technology to disrupt the art system somehow came through. So it was a pivotal moment in that sense.

I think the art world and digital world and media and tech worlds proceed in parallel ways, and we - as a museum of art, media and tech - occupy a specific position at that crossroads because we combine all those things institutionally and curatorially. We reach out to both worlds, and bring them together to present something for a broad audience informed by specific knowledge.

U: This seems to be an idea of language? Someone who is technologically minded maybe doesn’t have the language to converse with an artist who has gone to the RA and has been drawing life models for 15 years.

AC: Yes, that shared language and ability to communicate is only a recent development, born from collaboration. The younger generation of artists are increasingly embracing the technological elements in their work, because it’s part of life. Shutting off the world is not something that an artist would put their mind to.

Artists working with technology are often keen to understand how the artwork can itself be mediated, in a certain way, and how the art world systemically is functioning. Involving an entire creative ecosystem from production to dissemination and reception is fascinating.

U: And memes are at the heart of that, because they are now communicated much more intuitively than artworks. I mean, if an artist posts a work on Instagram and 10,000 people see it, that’s relatively successful. That’s more views than it would have got than in their studio or in a gallery. But when a meme hits that viral threshold, and millions of people see and share it, it’s engagement on a radically different scale. Yet we’re basically dealing with the same item - a small square image, basically a unit of visual information.

AC: It’s like a letter in an alphabet - something you build meaning out of. Or like a gene in a biological structure, it’s part of something bigger. The fantastic thing is that there’s no control over it.

When an artist puts their work out into the world, they completely lose control of it, because they can no longer dictate its interpretation down the line - and with memes this is much more compressed. You could produce a meme as a joke for a friend and suddenly it’s viral, and in a matter of hours it’s become something else. It has been adopted in a different region of the world to say something that you never intended. This is the idea of authorship. It’s an interesting element to think about because artists who put work out into the digital world still consider themselves the author - for example in terms of NFTs still feel entitled to resale rights etc. Meme producers don’t really claim ownership of their content simply because it’s not practical. Technically you’re completely cut off.

U: Does the exhibition tread the line between where a meme creator becomes an artist, or vice versa? Is there even a point in differentiating between the two roles in terms of output?

AC: It’s a very thin case to make. Because you might have artists who take memes as raw material and then produce artworks from it, but they are still considered artwork. Mauro is one of these, or Christine Wong is another case. But then how do you trace that sort of journey? It’s an open question. Personally, when you put something out into the world as a meme, I think there’s little point in trying to track and control its interpretation. The purpose of the meme is not the content, it’s the journey, it’s the transfer of the message, but the message can also change. It’s a constantly shape shifting idea in its format, its meaning, its reception, reputation, reuse - unapologetically.

Memes are a cultural format which somehow sidestep the whole questions of authorship, marketability, economic return etc. They elude this whole sphere, which, if you want, goes all the way back to the idea of artistic expression - in principle, you don’t make art to make money. Obviously, you have to make a living as an artist. You have to create the structure, the market, commission, collections and everything. But in principle, you didn’t go into art to make millions. It’s something you want to do, and you do it because you have something to say as an artist. So there is an interesting parallel between the two worlds. It’s not that you want to make millions, but want to reach millions. You want as wide an audience as possible to share and engage. Ultimately, the impact of what you have to say is most important. And if you want to say that through an artwork, or through a meme, they’re still expressions of yourself. Somehow they circulate in different ways. Obviously they have different impacts. But in the end, it’s interesting to analyse both from the same lens, which is the cultural, political, the social lens as well, and see what comes out in the wash.

Memememememe runs at Media Majlis Museum, Doha, Qatar until 4 December 2025