The meme shares many attributes with the trickster: the ability to exonerate the guilty and implicate the free, to profane the sacred while hallowing the lowly, and to cut through complex issues and calcified defenses with Trojan-horse simplicity. Therefore, its relationship to art, much like our own, is complicated. To even begin to comment on the meme, one must first be able to speak of art. This is in itself a high order. To fail to recognize the aesthetic attributes of a revered work is to risk philistinism, while to sing too loudly the praise of overrated or simply bad art is to risk the labels of basic, mid-brow, and plebeian. To begin to approach the art object as the work calls for, one must adopt what the late anthropologist Alfred Gell called methodological philistinism.
The concept is a sort of play on sociologist and theologian Peter Berger’s methodological atheism, a principle necessary for analyzing religious ideas in which the anthropologist must set aside their own convictions, or lack thereof, and adopt the assumption that none of the religious aspects at hand are literally true. Modernity, Gell goes on to argue, has adopted art as its religion, calling “aesthetics…a branch of moral discourse which depends on the acceptance of the initial articles of faith”. Methodological philistinism requires an approach of stout indifference towards the aesthetic value of works of art “because to admit this kind of value is equivalent to admitting, so to speak, that religion is true.”