Category: In English

Part 7 of the essay collection “Slang of Content Nerds to Art and Back” Two days before this essay was published, the EU began requiring synthetic content to be labelled — and was thereby forced to take a stand, at the level of law, on this series’ fundamental question: when is a meme art? The…

Part 6 of the essay collection “Slang of Content Nerds to Art and Back” In November 2024, Sotheby’s sold a banana for 6.2 million dollars. The fruit itself cost 35 cents, so what was actually sold was an idea (which resembles a meme) and a certificate of authenticity (which is what art institutions are all…

Part 5/7 of the essay series “Slang of Content Nerds to Art and Back” For a historically brief moment, the image counted as proof of reality. That era can be said to have ended, at the latest, in 2025–2026, when generative AI took the image’s power of proof without passing it on to anyone. Everything…

Part 4/7 of the essay series “Slang of Content Nerds to Art and Back“ A culture begins to exist at the moment when genres can be distinguished within it. Meme culture is starting to have all of culture’s equipment in place: a grammar, registers of irony, community dialects, historical self-awareness, and a merciless tribunal of…

Part 3/7 of the essay series “Slang of Content Nerds to Art and Back“ Deniability has no political direction. The same ironic frame that protected the dissident normalizes prejudice regardless of the flag it is flown under. And the cost of the joke is often carried by someone quite different from its target. This part…

Part 2/7 from the essay series “Slang of Content Nerds to Art and Back” The dissident art of the Cold War era solved a logically impossible task: to say something and be able to prove, at the same time, that no such thing was said — let alone meant. The same three-layered structure — an…

Part 1/7 from the essay series “Slang of Content Nerds to Art and Back” Hannah Höch’s scissors and the meme maker’s copy-paste are technically very similar gestures, but the comparison between Dada and memes is at its most interesting exactly where it tears. Dada was negation with a target, whereas memes churn like folklore, with…

FIELD NOTES • Art Basel 2026 suggests that contemporary art is searching for its next direction without having found it yet.• Nostalgia, algorithms, nature and digital aesthetics recur throughout the fair, but none has yet emerged as a defining new language.• The market’s renewed confidence in historical references may reflect uncertainty about the present as…