“I am not here claiming that the outside is always beneficent. There are more than enough terrors to be found there; but such terrors are not all there is to the outside.”¹ I begin with a quote from the last book by Mark Fisher The Weird and the Eerie (2018) this article regarding another book, Memestetica, il settembre eterno dell’arte written by Valentina Tanni and published on July 2020 by NERO Editions.

Maybe ad odd choice but which I find particularly fitting with respect to what I think the author has succeeded in doing with this book, a crucial editorial project that achieves in a quite tricky operation, that is to combine in a single physical and theoretical space a series of phenomena and subcultures that have been inadequately and partiality recounted for years. Valentina Tanni dives into this world, characterized by often absurd, disturbing and unsettling elements, and illustrates it beyond any common stereotypes and prejudices. The themes developed in Memestetica are many and difficult to summarize in rigid and clear-cut analytical categories.

Each has its own place and weight within the discourse and in relation to the cultural and social products that we encounter in our daily life: the technological evolution of photography, the era of nonsense and absurdity, the value of ugliness and failure, the grammar of memes, the assimilation of performance art and personal broadcasting. Like in a sequence of hyperlinks, the author manages to tackle each theme in its complexity, by means of theoretical, visual and artistic references, which intertwine and run within the text, to then flow into a broader analysis and produce a consistent overview of contemporary visual culture, addressed as an autonomous cultural product and positioned within its own historical heritage.

Photographic production is the privileged area of ​​analysis, as an unstable but pervasive tool for the reproduction and the creation of reality. Far from having been supplanted by new technical possibilities, photography acquires a renewed centrality in the contemporary visual ecosystem. As the author explains: “The evolution of photography is not only technological, but also philosophical and social. The most relevant datum regards his relationship with the concepts of reality and truth – a relationship that has become literally schizophrenic”².

More and more people can take part, more or less consciously, in the production of the common imaginary and photography is the main tool through which this production articulates itself. If the camera extends the human gaze enhancing every imagination, as stated by Jean-Louis Comolli³, new technologies allow us to extend our creative capacity of the world beyond mere representation. Despite the awareness of the possibilities of manipulation, that we operate ourselves every day on our content, photos and videos continue to be the main means of documentation and archiving – pics or it didn’t happen. A continuous exchange between the real and the digital world, also made possible by a large-scale dissemination of devices that does not allow us to escape this unending communication but rather naturally integrates it into every moment of everyday life.

A particularly interesting dynamic explored throughout the book is the relationship between memetic and artistic production. Two areas that seem inherently distant in their history and structure and are often in opposition, as the author points out contemporary art is regularly ridiculed and received with annoyance on the internet, but which actually share a wide range of codes and values. The art system, as well as the world wide web, has been carrying out since the end of the twentieth century a great campaign for the democratization of the means of production and fruition.

In the artistic field, the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century had already initiated questioning the traditional idea of art and artistic doing, with the ambition of overcoming the separation between art and life, which seems to have now found its realization on the web. Greater diffusion and access to the internet have therefore made these ambitions a reality, producing a mass participation that has not, however, given rise to the much-desired utopia.

Like an embodiment of the Expectation vs. Reality me. The emancipation of the individual from technical and theoretical means and the progressive loss of control and authority on the part of the art system and the original digital community have in fact produced hostility and closure. In this sense, the book follows a circular path that finds its beginning and end in the concept of the eternal September. An expression that symbolizes the historical moment in which the internet started its transformation into a means of mass communication – September 1993 – opening up to a continuous flow of neophytes and amateurs. The author thus applies this concept the context of art, characterized from the affirmation of an increasingly widespread and uncontrollable amateur creativity. New people, new energies but also new tensions. A perpetual conflict between the old and the new.