An Examination of Classical Art Impact and Popularity through Social Media Emotion Analysis of Art Memes and Museum Posts

Abstract

On Instagram, we have all seen memes. Honestly, what would you do if you encountered a meme in a museum? The purpose of the study is to evaluate the nexus between posts uploaded by museum visitors and emotions, as well as the popularity of artworks and memes. We gathered N = 4.526 (N = 1.222 for memes and N = 3.304 for museum posts) entire posts using API. We selected the total number of likes, comments, frequency, nwords, and text emotions as indicators for several supervised machine learning tasks. Moreover, we used a ranking algorithm to measure meme and artwork popularity. Our experiments revealed the most prevalent emotions in both the memes dataset and museum posts dataset. The ranking task showed the most popular meme and museum post, respectively, that can influence the aesthetic experience and its popularity. This study provided further insight into the social media sphere that has had a significant effect on the aesthetic experience of museums and artwork’s popularity. As a final point, we anticipate that our outcomes will serve as a springboard for future studies in social media, art, and cultural analytics.