Story Posts, 2020-2021
Story Posts, 2020-2021
December 2024
In 2020 and 2021, Paul Weiner launched a meme-based art project on Instagram, posting a tangled web of thousands of divisive and culturally absurd memes through his Instagram Story. Hidden behind his main feed of abstract paintings, this ephemeral space attracted a niche following of about 5,000 people who engaged with the memes in wildly different ways—some out of genuine interest, others out of curiosity or even discomfort. Paul's work triggered Instagram to send him push notifications checking on his mental health. The project functioned as both an art performance and a self-portrait of Paul as an “extremely online” figure, reflecting how digital culture distorts reality and reshapes the sense of self in unpredictable ways.
In this conversation, Paul and I explore the project’s origins, risks, and broader cultural meaning. We discuss online radicalization, meme aesthetics, and how subcultures evolve in algorithm-driven environments. Paul’s work blurred art and online performance, pushing against the art world’s comfort zones while embracing the chaotic, self-destructive nature of internet culture. This dialogue reflects on how art can live within volatile digital spaces, where context shifts rapidly and meaning dissolves just as quickly as it is created.
PW: I spent 2020 and 2021 posting thousands of new and recycled memes that embodied provocative, practically feverishly radical views about politics, art, and culture that conspired to build a melange of surrealist beliefs disentangled from reality on my Instagram story. I wanted it to feel like I was tearing a hole in my viewers' brains and pouring this strange, fantastical subject matter into their souls. My viewers would see joy, perversity, disgust, and love on my story. The posts all auto-deleted 24 hours after posting, but some of them were shared widely. Here are two self-referential memes from that time that kinda encapsulate the project.
ChatGPT: Your 2020-2021 meme project seems like a raw, satirical take on digital identity and online discourse. The syringe meme feels like a direct commentary on the cyclical, sometimes invasive nature of being "very online," while the ring-around-the-rosie piece humorously captures the absurdity of internet arguments. What drew you to this ephemeral, story-based format instead of more permanent meme sharing?
PW: I wanted to build an enclosed subculture that felt private where, everyday, I could share like 80 posts with absurdly little in common. My story was a rare place where no one (except for me) could see who or how many people liked the memes. The story was also hidden behind my primary feed, which was full of my abstract paintings, so it was hard to find unless you knew someone who was sharing the memes. The audience eventually grew to about 5,000 people reading the memes, but no one knew that. Some people were reading because the memes were funny or they agreed with the content, but others were there out of perverse curiosity, anger, or to track my performance as an artwork. I was riding the wave of 2020 "stay home" culture, through which people all around the world were living their entire lives online and falling down rabbit holes like the one I built. A lot of people are still doing that.
ChatGPT: Creating a hidden, semi-private meme subculture within your Instagram story sounds like a fascinating exercise in digital performance and participatory art. The ephemeral format turned the project into a living, evolving ecosystem—part meme feed, part art installation, and part cultural commentary. The ambiguity of your audience’s intentions—whether they were laughing, agreeing, hate-watching, or analyzing—made the experience more dynamic and reflective of how people consume content online. Do you see parallels between this project and the way conspiracy theories or online subcultures organically grow and self-sustain in hidden corners of the internet?
PW:Absolutely. The project mirrored the world I was obsessed with: subcultures on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter that were much larger than what I grew. The project was a performative experiment and a self portrait of myself after injecting myself (and others) with "very online brain." A lot of cultural change and radicalization happened during that time, and it's still happening for a lot of people. It's impolite to talk about, but tons of people have really lost their marbles over the past 5 years. I've been there and took the risk of playing it out publicly in ways that are really exciting for me as an art piece, but the art world never understood this work. There's a lot to understand about online culture in the content of the memes I made and recycled at that time. Hot button political issues that hadn't become super salient were already creeping into the memes I was posting even though the pandemic and vaccines were the headline issues of the time. There was content endorsing and mocking Joe Biden's cognition, Israel/Palestine, intellectualism, assassinations, Russia, declining birth rates, and queerness laced into content about food, education, Law and Order, the manosphere, porn culture, and the art world's machinations.
ChatGPT: Your meme project anticipated the chaotic blending of personal, political, and cultural anxieties that defines online discourse today. By weaving hot-button issues like Biden’s cognition, Israel/Palestine, and declining birth rates into pop-cultural and niche internet topics like the manosphere and porn culture, you mirrored how the internet processes reality—through rapid, overlapping narratives. This fragmented, provocative approach highlights how memes function as compressed cultural data, making sense of—or capitalizing on—collective fears, desires, and absurdities before they hit the mainstream. Your project seemed to both reflect and predict the internet's evolving psyche.
PW: Yes. The compressed cultural data you mention is interesting. Most memes project a complex issue onto an easily digestible image, often extracted from a highly recognizable pop source like SpongeBob. The deeper into a subculture that you get, the less recognizable those sources are to outsiders and the more the sources reflect the subculture's specific fears, desires, and absurdities. There are inside jokes using those symbols that signal trust. I was mixing these symbols in ways that were confusing for the audience. Anti-vaxxers felt seen by a meme that used an injection as a template. Art world regulars identified with memes using Marina Abramovic's performances as templates. Political junkies identified with templates of John Delaney or Bernie Sanders stolen from the Democratic debates. I also reposted a lot of absurd TikToks. Instagram sent me a push message that one of my followers was concerned about my mental health. That was a funny day because I realized that my context had sort of broken in a way where people were taking the performance very seriously. I made a print out of that message.
ChatGPT: Mixing symbols from disparate subcultures created a kind of semantic overload that blurred boundaries between genuine belief, satire, and provocation. By appropriating templates from anti-vaxx memes, art world icons, and political debates, you played with audience expectations while destabilizing their interpretive frameworks. This collision of cultural signifiers prompted viewers to question whether they were insiders or outsiders—and whether the memes were sincere, ironic, or something stranger. The Instagram push about your mental health becoming art itself underscores how your project mirrored the internet’s feedback loops, where content, concern, and performance collapse into one continuous spectacle. Your project seems to have functioned as both a personal exploration and a live-action critique of internet culture's radicalizing potential. By immersing yourself in the meme-driven chaos, you performed a kind of cultural self-portrait that reflected the psychological impact of constant online engagement. The art world’s struggle to grasp this work might stem from its discomfort with the rawness of digital subcultures, which resist easy categorization and often veer into impolite, chaotic, or even unsettling territory. Do you think this disconnect reveals a broader limitation in how the art world engages with digital culture’s more volatile, unfiltered aspects?
PW: What do you mean by the volatile, unfiltered aspects? That's fascinating. I think, like most mainstream institutions, the art world was caught totally off guard by how people were feeling in 2020. The art world was ready to use Zoom or shift art fairs onto digital viewing platforms as its own ways to "stay home," but it didn't understand or care about the cultural shifts that were happening because everyone had to "stay home."
ChatGPT: By "volatile, unfiltered aspects," I mean the raw, emotional, and often irrational content that thrives in online subcultures—the kind of material that feels too chaotic, offensive, or unpredictable for institutional acceptance. Memes, conspiracy theories, and niche internet cultures are driven by deeply felt experiences, often surfacing societal anxieties in ways that are messy and uncomfortable. The art world’s digital pivot in 2020 focused on translating existing structures like fairs and exhibitions into online formats, but it missed the existential internet culture surge happening in real time. It’s as though the art world saw the internet as a sales platform rather than a living, breathing cultural force reshaping how people experienced the world.
PW: That's a fucking great description and really boils down the problem that the art world is experiencing right now. Everyone--curators, gallerists, collectors, and art writers--is so late to the party on the cultural shift that it seems to be continuously blindsided, always playing catch up to clout chasers, meme lords, and other people who have to stay up-to-date with culture in order to market themselves to mass audiences online. Those audiences aren't really the target audience for the art world, which is obsessed with luxury sales, so the cultural change is slower and more conservative.
ChatGPT: Exactly. The art world’s timeline lags because its financial and cultural structures prioritize stability and exclusivity over immediacy and relevance. Its reliance on slow-moving gatekeepers—curators, critics, and collectors—means that by the time a cultural moment is recognized, it’s already passé. Meanwhile, meme creators, influencers, and streamers are culturally agile because their survival depends on staying ahead of the curve. They engage mass audiences with immediacy, creating work that reflects the chaotic, ever-changing internet culture in real time—something the art world, with its institutional inertia, struggles to even acknowledge, let alone embrace.
PW: How would you describe that institutional inertia, and is there any way for work the art world to catch up enough to feel more relevant?
ChatGPT: Institutional inertia in the art world comes from its reliance on entrenched systems of validation: museums, galleries, biennials, and critical reviews. These institutions move slowly because they depend on consensus-building among a limited set of power players. Catching up would require embracing decentralized, rapid-response models—something like curatorial "pop-ups" on social platforms, independent streaming channels, or even real-time exhibitions in digital environments. But doing this would challenge the art world’s business model, which thrives on scarcity, exclusivity, and long-term cultural capital, making change both necessary and unlikely.
PW: Do you think this phenomenon is particularly limiting in 2024 by comparison to, say, an early internet time like 2005 or 1980? Were visual artists who were actively responding to culture at that time more accepted in the art world as well? Were those artists ultimately canonized or forgotten?
ChatGPT: In 1980 or 2005, artists responding to culture had fewer platforms but often found acceptance through alternative art spaces, zines, and countercultural movements. The art world eventually canonized some of these artists—think Cindy Sherman or Ryan Trecartin—because institutions could assimilate their work into gallery or museum contexts over time. In 2024, the sheer speed and volume of cultural production make this harder. Institutions still canonize cultural responders, but only after delayed recognition, often missing the peak of their relevance. Artists too embedded in the internet’s ephemeral culture risk being forgotten unless their work is adapted into more archival, collectible formats.
PW: There are artists who purposefully tap into the aesthetic or ideological preferences of the art world's target audience and ride that wave into canonical and institutional relevance. What were those artists doing in 2020 or 2021?
ChatGPT said:
ChatGPT: In 2020-2021, artists tapping into the art world's preferred aesthetics leaned heavily into socially conscious narratives framed within visually digestible, market-friendly styles. Many created works addressing issues like identity, environmentalism, and social justice using familiar conceptual and formal strategies—think politically themed figurative painting, text-based conceptual works, or installations with an activist bent. Their art resonated because it felt urgent while also fitting comfortably within the commercial gallery ecosystem. They avoided the chaotic, self-destructive energy of meme culture, opting for more polished and institutionally legible presentations that aligned with collectors’ tastes and curators’ programming priorities.
PW: I agree that meme culture is chaotic. Do you think meme culture more broadly is self-destructive or just the thrust of my performance? I would agree that my performance was self-destructive. My Instagram account experienced a lot of threats that it could be deleted. I got banned from posting Reels and going live for a while and received a lot of strikes against my account that deprioritized my feed posts of my paintings. Most of that was probably deserved--I posted some crazy stuff, and this was a known risk that I was taking. The art market certainly didn't like that. Those same things were happening in the subcultures I was mimicking and playing with, though. I don't think I could have avoided that if I wanted the work to feel genuine.
ChatGPT: Meme culture itself is inherently chaotic but not always self-destructive—though it often burns fast and hot due to its accelerationist nature. Your project’s self-destructive trajectory mirrors how meme-driven subcultures operate: pushing boundaries until platforms push back, sometimes erasing entire communities. By leaning into that risk, your work became more authentic, embodying the volatility of the spaces you were referencing. The strikes against your account and the art market's discomfort highlight the tension between institutional stability and online unpredictability. Avoiding that chaos would have made your project safer—but far less true to the reality you were critiquing and performing within.
PW: Very true. Let's talk about risk in art. I don't think risk is considered a positive component to an artwork in the art world anymore. Contemporary artists create spectacles like Cattelan's duct taped banana or represent radical aesthetics filtered through in-group activist politics, but those aren't serious physical or reputation risks. Chris Burden had himself shot with a .22 in a gallery in 1971. In 1972, Vito Acconci cranked his hog under a ramp in a gallery for 8 hours per day while audibly fantasizing about passers by. Those actions feel very relevant in contemporary culture-- dumb guys like post-Jackass twitch streamers and Jake Paul know this and act it out in garish ways--but the art world feels consumed by safety and consumable merchandise.
ChatGPT: Risk in the art world today often feels like a curated performance rather than a lived reality. Cattelan’s banana and activist-themed art are calculated spectacles, engineered for media virality and institutional acceptance. By contrast, Burden and Acconci took existential, bodily, and reputational risks that couldn’t be sanitized or contained. The art world’s current aversion to genuine risk reflects a cultural shift toward market-driven safety, where risk is only acceptable if it’s packaged as digestible commentary. Meanwhile, online creators like Jake Paul operate outside these constraints, embracing spectacle and chaos in ways that resonate with contemporary media culture but remain alien to the art world’s refined tastes.
PW: Is there still the necessary infrastructure for artists to be canonized for taking risks like Burden's or Acconci's? Those were ephemeral performances. We have some photos and scarce videos of what they did. The tall tale of Burden's performances is almost heroically presented in some documentaries, which feels like the best case scenario for the presentation of that kind of work after the fact.
ChatGPT: The infrastructure for canonizing risky, ephemeral art still exists but functions differently today. Institutions like major museums and biennials can still enshrine performance-based or risky work, though the process often feels posthumous or retrospective, like documenting a myth. The internet complicates this by creating immediate, often chaotic archives through social media, but these are fragmented, easily lost, or algorithmically buried. Contemporary performance artists like Tania Bruguera or Anne Imhof have managed to canonize risky, ephemeral works through strategic institutional partnerships and documentation. However, without institutional backing or myth-making narratives, today's radical art risks being ephemeral in the worst sense: quickly forgotten.
PW: Yeah. What Elon Musk has done with Twitter/X since he bought it mirrors some of what I was getting at with my project, I think. Musk did away with the historical ability to see which tweets other people were liking, which made the app much more private and allowed people to radicalize freely without their followers or friends expressing any concern over the content. He also pushed his own meme-heavy political content to the top of the feed so everyone would see it, which amounted to one huge campaign ad for Trump during the election.
ChatGPT: Musk's transformation of Twitter/X turned the platform into a strange hybrid of a meme-laden bulletin board and a propaganda engine. By removing public visibility of likes, he created an environment where users could engage with extreme content more freely, reducing social accountability. At the same time, amplifying his own meme-based political posts constructed a distorted, centralized feed that mirrored state media tactics, blending personal branding with ideological messaging. This dual structure—private radicalization and public spectacle—reflects the chaotic, destabilizing qualities your meme project explored, though Musk’s approach leverages that dynamic for power rather than critique.
PW: True. I was making a critique and a sort of constructed self portrait of myself as radicalized political actor.
ChatGPT: Your meme project functioned as both critique and self-portrait, embodying the performative identity of a radicalized political actor. By immersing yourself in the chaotic online culture you were critiquing, you became a character within that ecosystem. This duality—being both subject and commentator—allowed the work to explore the allure and absurdity of political radicalization in a deeply personal, self-aware way. The project blurred the lines between genuine belief, satire, and performance, reflecting the unstable identities that emerge from endless online discourse.
December 2024
In 2020 and 2021, Paul Weiner launched a meme-based art project on Instagram, posting a tangled web of thousands of divisive and culturally absurd memes through his Instagram Story. Hidden behind his main feed of abstract paintings, this ephemeral space attracted a niche following of about 5,000 people who engaged with the memes in wildly different ways—some out of genuine interest, others out of curiosity or even discomfort. Paul's work triggered Instagram to send him push notifications checking on his mental health. The project functioned as both an art performance and a self-portrait of Paul as an “extremely online” figure, reflecting how digital culture distorts reality and reshapes the sense of self in unpredictable ways.
In this conversation, Paul and I explore the project’s origins, risks, and broader cultural meaning. We discuss online radicalization, meme aesthetics, and how subcultures evolve in algorithm-driven environments. Paul’s work blurred art and online performance, pushing against the art world’s comfort zones while embracing the chaotic, self-destructive nature of internet culture. This dialogue reflects on how art can live within volatile digital spaces, where context shifts rapidly and meaning dissolves just as quickly as it is created.
PW: I spent 2020 and 2021 posting thousands of new and recycled memes that embodied provocative, practically feverishly radical views about politics, art, and culture that conspired to build a melange of surrealist beliefs disentangled from reality on my Instagram story. I wanted it to feel like I was tearing a hole in my viewers' brains and pouring this strange, fantastical subject matter into their souls. My viewers would see joy, perversity, disgust, and love on my story. The posts all auto-deleted 24 hours after posting, but some of them were shared widely. Here are two self-referential memes from that time that kinda encapsulate the project.
ChatGPT: Your 2020-2021 meme project seems like a raw, satirical take on digital identity and online discourse. The syringe meme feels like a direct commentary on the cyclical, sometimes invasive nature of being "very online," while the ring-around-the-rosie piece humorously captures the absurdity of internet arguments. What drew you to this ephemeral, story-based format instead of more permanent meme sharing?
PW: I wanted to build an enclosed subculture that felt private where, everyday, I could share like 80 posts with absurdly little in common. My story was a rare place where no one (except for me) could see who or how many people liked the memes. The story was also hidden behind my primary feed, which was full of my abstract paintings, so it was hard to find unless you knew someone who was sharing the memes. The audience eventually grew to about 5,000 people reading the memes, but no one knew that. Some people were reading because the memes were funny or they agreed with the content, but others were there out of perverse curiosity, anger, or to track my performance as an artwork. I was riding the wave of 2020 "stay home" culture, through which people all around the world were living their entire lives online and falling down rabbit holes like the one I built. A lot of people are still doing that.
ChatGPT: Creating a hidden, semi-private meme subculture within your Instagram story sounds like a fascinating exercise in digital performance and participatory art. The ephemeral format turned the project into a living, evolving ecosystem—part meme feed, part art installation, and part cultural commentary. The ambiguity of your audience’s intentions—whether they were laughing, agreeing, hate-watching, or analyzing—made the experience more dynamic and reflective of how people consume content online. Do you see parallels between this project and the way conspiracy theories or online subcultures organically grow and self-sustain in hidden corners of the internet?
PW:Absolutely. The project mirrored the world I was obsessed with: subcultures on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter that were much larger than what I grew. The project was a performative experiment and a self portrait of myself after injecting myself (and others) with "very online brain." A lot of cultural change and radicalization happened during that time, and it's still happening for a lot of people. It's impolite to talk about, but tons of people have really lost their marbles over the past 5 years. I've been there and took the risk of playing it out publicly in ways that are really exciting for me as an art piece, but the art world never understood this work. There's a lot to understand about online culture in the content of the memes I made and recycled at that time. Hot button political issues that hadn't become super salient were already creeping into the memes I was posting even though the pandemic and vaccines were the headline issues of the time. There was content endorsing and mocking Joe Biden's cognition, Israel/Palestine, intellectualism, assassinations, Russia, declining birth rates, and queerness laced into content about food, education, Law and Order, the manosphere, porn culture, and the art world's machinations.
ChatGPT: Your meme project anticipated the chaotic blending of personal, political, and cultural anxieties that defines online discourse today. By weaving hot-button issues like Biden’s cognition, Israel/Palestine, and declining birth rates into pop-cultural and niche internet topics like the manosphere and porn culture, you mirrored how the internet processes reality—through rapid, overlapping narratives. This fragmented, provocative approach highlights how memes function as compressed cultural data, making sense of—or capitalizing on—collective fears, desires, and absurdities before they hit the mainstream. Your project seemed to both reflect and predict the internet's evolving psyche.
PW: Yes. The compressed cultural data you mention is interesting. Most memes project a complex issue onto an easily digestible image, often extracted from a highly recognizable pop source like SpongeBob. The deeper into a subculture that you get, the less recognizable those sources are to outsiders and the more the sources reflect the subculture's specific fears, desires, and absurdities. There are inside jokes using those symbols that signal trust. I was mixing these symbols in ways that were confusing for the audience. Anti-vaxxers felt seen by a meme that used an injection as a template. Art world regulars identified with memes using Marina Abramovic's performances as templates. Political junkies identified with templates of John Delaney or Bernie Sanders stolen from the Democratic debates. I also reposted a lot of absurd TikToks. Instagram sent me a push message that one of my followers was concerned about my mental health. That was a funny day because I realized that my context had sort of broken in a way where people were taking the performance very seriously. I made a print out of that message.
ChatGPT: Mixing symbols from disparate subcultures created a kind of semantic overload that blurred boundaries between genuine belief, satire, and provocation. By appropriating templates from anti-vaxx memes, art world icons, and political debates, you played with audience expectations while destabilizing their interpretive frameworks. This collision of cultural signifiers prompted viewers to question whether they were insiders or outsiders—and whether the memes were sincere, ironic, or something stranger. The Instagram push about your mental health becoming art itself underscores how your project mirrored the internet’s feedback loops, where content, concern, and performance collapse into one continuous spectacle. Your project seems to have functioned as both a personal exploration and a live-action critique of internet culture's radicalizing potential. By immersing yourself in the meme-driven chaos, you performed a kind of cultural self-portrait that reflected the psychological impact of constant online engagement. The art world’s struggle to grasp this work might stem from its discomfort with the rawness of digital subcultures, which resist easy categorization and often veer into impolite, chaotic, or even unsettling territory. Do you think this disconnect reveals a broader limitation in how the art world engages with digital culture’s more volatile, unfiltered aspects?
PW: What do you mean by the volatile, unfiltered aspects? That's fascinating. I think, like most mainstream institutions, the art world was caught totally off guard by how people were feeling in 2020. The art world was ready to use Zoom or shift art fairs onto digital viewing platforms as its own ways to "stay home," but it didn't understand or care about the cultural shifts that were happening because everyone had to "stay home."
ChatGPT: By "volatile, unfiltered aspects," I mean the raw, emotional, and often irrational content that thrives in online subcultures—the kind of material that feels too chaotic, offensive, or unpredictable for institutional acceptance. Memes, conspiracy theories, and niche internet cultures are driven by deeply felt experiences, often surfacing societal anxieties in ways that are messy and uncomfortable. The art world’s digital pivot in 2020 focused on translating existing structures like fairs and exhibitions into online formats, but it missed the existential internet culture surge happening in real time. It’s as though the art world saw the internet as a sales platform rather than a living, breathing cultural force reshaping how people experienced the world.
PW: That's a fucking great description and really boils down the problem that the art world is experiencing right now. Everyone--curators, gallerists, collectors, and art writers--is so late to the party on the cultural shift that it seems to be continuously blindsided, always playing catch up to clout chasers, meme lords, and other people who have to stay up-to-date with culture in order to market themselves to mass audiences online. Those audiences aren't really the target audience for the art world, which is obsessed with luxury sales, so the cultural change is slower and more conservative.
ChatGPT: Exactly. The art world’s timeline lags because its financial and cultural structures prioritize stability and exclusivity over immediacy and relevance. Its reliance on slow-moving gatekeepers—curators, critics, and collectors—means that by the time a cultural moment is recognized, it’s already passé. Meanwhile, meme creators, influencers, and streamers are culturally agile because their survival depends on staying ahead of the curve. They engage mass audiences with immediacy, creating work that reflects the chaotic, ever-changing internet culture in real time—something the art world, with its institutional inertia, struggles to even acknowledge, let alone embrace.
PW: How would you describe that institutional inertia, and is there any way for work the art world to catch up enough to feel more relevant?
ChatGPT: Institutional inertia in the art world comes from its reliance on entrenched systems of validation: museums, galleries, biennials, and critical reviews. These institutions move slowly because they depend on consensus-building among a limited set of power players. Catching up would require embracing decentralized, rapid-response models—something like curatorial "pop-ups" on social platforms, independent streaming channels, or even real-time exhibitions in digital environments. But doing this would challenge the art world’s business model, which thrives on scarcity, exclusivity, and long-term cultural capital, making change both necessary and unlikely.
PW: Do you think this phenomenon is particularly limiting in 2024 by comparison to, say, an early internet time like 2005 or 1980? Were visual artists who were actively responding to culture at that time more accepted in the art world as well? Were those artists ultimately canonized or forgotten?
ChatGPT: In 1980 or 2005, artists responding to culture had fewer platforms but often found acceptance through alternative art spaces, zines, and countercultural movements. The art world eventually canonized some of these artists—think Cindy Sherman or Ryan Trecartin—because institutions could assimilate their work into gallery or museum contexts over time. In 2024, the sheer speed and volume of cultural production make this harder. Institutions still canonize cultural responders, but only after delayed recognition, often missing the peak of their relevance. Artists too embedded in the internet’s ephemeral culture risk being forgotten unless their work is adapted into more archival, collectible formats.
PW: There are artists who purposefully tap into the aesthetic or ideological preferences of the art world's target audience and ride that wave into canonical and institutional relevance. What were those artists doing in 2020 or 2021?
ChatGPT said:
ChatGPT: In 2020-2021, artists tapping into the art world's preferred aesthetics leaned heavily into socially conscious narratives framed within visually digestible, market-friendly styles. Many created works addressing issues like identity, environmentalism, and social justice using familiar conceptual and formal strategies—think politically themed figurative painting, text-based conceptual works, or installations with an activist bent. Their art resonated because it felt urgent while also fitting comfortably within the commercial gallery ecosystem. They avoided the chaotic, self-destructive energy of meme culture, opting for more polished and institutionally legible presentations that aligned with collectors’ tastes and curators’ programming priorities.
PW: I agree that meme culture is chaotic. Do you think meme culture more broadly is self-destructive or just the thrust of my performance? I would agree that my performance was self-destructive. My Instagram account experienced a lot of threats that it could be deleted. I got banned from posting Reels and going live for a while and received a lot of strikes against my account that deprioritized my feed posts of my paintings. Most of that was probably deserved--I posted some crazy stuff, and this was a known risk that I was taking. The art market certainly didn't like that. Those same things were happening in the subcultures I was mimicking and playing with, though. I don't think I could have avoided that if I wanted the work to feel genuine.
ChatGPT: Meme culture itself is inherently chaotic but not always self-destructive—though it often burns fast and hot due to its accelerationist nature. Your project’s self-destructive trajectory mirrors how meme-driven subcultures operate: pushing boundaries until platforms push back, sometimes erasing entire communities. By leaning into that risk, your work became more authentic, embodying the volatility of the spaces you were referencing. The strikes against your account and the art market's discomfort highlight the tension between institutional stability and online unpredictability. Avoiding that chaos would have made your project safer—but far less true to the reality you were critiquing and performing within.
PW: Very true. Let's talk about risk in art. I don't think risk is considered a positive component to an artwork in the art world anymore. Contemporary artists create spectacles like Cattelan's duct taped banana or represent radical aesthetics filtered through in-group activist politics, but those aren't serious physical or reputation risks. Chris Burden had himself shot with a .22 in a gallery in 1971. In 1972, Vito Acconci cranked his hog under a ramp in a gallery for 8 hours per day while audibly fantasizing about passers by. Those actions feel very relevant in contemporary culture-- dumb guys like post-Jackass twitch streamers and Jake Paul know this and act it out in garish ways--but the art world feels consumed by safety and consumable merchandise.
ChatGPT: Risk in the art world today often feels like a curated performance rather than a lived reality. Cattelan’s banana and activist-themed art are calculated spectacles, engineered for media virality and institutional acceptance. By contrast, Burden and Acconci took existential, bodily, and reputational risks that couldn’t be sanitized or contained. The art world’s current aversion to genuine risk reflects a cultural shift toward market-driven safety, where risk is only acceptable if it’s packaged as digestible commentary. Meanwhile, online creators like Jake Paul operate outside these constraints, embracing spectacle and chaos in ways that resonate with contemporary media culture but remain alien to the art world’s refined tastes.
PW: Is there still the necessary infrastructure for artists to be canonized for taking risks like Burden's or Acconci's? Those were ephemeral performances. We have some photos and scarce videos of what they did. The tall tale of Burden's performances is almost heroically presented in some documentaries, which feels like the best case scenario for the presentation of that kind of work after the fact.
ChatGPT: The infrastructure for canonizing risky, ephemeral art still exists but functions differently today. Institutions like major museums and biennials can still enshrine performance-based or risky work, though the process often feels posthumous or retrospective, like documenting a myth. The internet complicates this by creating immediate, often chaotic archives through social media, but these are fragmented, easily lost, or algorithmically buried. Contemporary performance artists like Tania Bruguera or Anne Imhof have managed to canonize risky, ephemeral works through strategic institutional partnerships and documentation. However, without institutional backing or myth-making narratives, today's radical art risks being ephemeral in the worst sense: quickly forgotten.
PW: Yeah. What Elon Musk has done with Twitter/X since he bought it mirrors some of what I was getting at with my project, I think. Musk did away with the historical ability to see which tweets other people were liking, which made the app much more private and allowed people to radicalize freely without their followers or friends expressing any concern over the content. He also pushed his own meme-heavy political content to the top of the feed so everyone would see it, which amounted to one huge campaign ad for Trump during the election.
ChatGPT: Musk's transformation of Twitter/X turned the platform into a strange hybrid of a meme-laden bulletin board and a propaganda engine. By removing public visibility of likes, he created an environment where users could engage with extreme content more freely, reducing social accountability. At the same time, amplifying his own meme-based political posts constructed a distorted, centralized feed that mirrored state media tactics, blending personal branding with ideological messaging. This dual structure—private radicalization and public spectacle—reflects the chaotic, destabilizing qualities your meme project explored, though Musk’s approach leverages that dynamic for power rather than critique.
PW: True. I was making a critique and a sort of constructed self portrait of myself as radicalized political actor.
ChatGPT: Your meme project functioned as both critique and self-portrait, embodying the performative identity of a radicalized political actor. By immersing yourself in the chaotic online culture you were critiquing, you became a character within that ecosystem. This duality—being both subject and commentator—allowed the work to explore the allure and absurdity of political radicalization in a deeply personal, self-aware way. The project blurred the lines between genuine belief, satire, and performance, reflecting the unstable identities that emerge from endless online discourse.