Editorial Introduction

Abstract

Editorial| October 01 2021 Editorial Introduction Emily A. Engel Emily A. Engel Emily A. Engel is an independent scholar based in Southern California. Engel authored Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections (U of Texas P, 2020), edited A Companion to Early Modern Lima (Brill, 2019) and co-edited Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches (Getty Publications, 2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2021) 3 (4): 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2021.3.4.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Emily A. Engel; Editorial Introduction. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1 October 2021; 3 (4): 1–4. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2021.3.4.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search We live in a visual culture, where people communicate through images from emoji to selfies to fine art and NFTs. In this environment, memes have become a common means of communication, entertainment form, and snarky millennial exchange fueled by the early twenty-first-century online social media explosion. Most famously in the last year, Tesla founder Elon Musk announced to his over fifty-seven million followers on Twitter that “who controls the memes controls the universe.”1 He has also referred to memes as “modern art,” which one can assume was intended to illustrate the creative, boundary-breaching nature of the virtual media form (fig. 1).2 However, Musk’s assertion belies the quotidian, real-time, fleeting nature of the highly accessible and emotionally impactful visual form by equating it to the elite, timeless historical category of modern art, which itself is wrought from the problematics of modernism. As images have come to replace... You do not currently have access to this content.