Internet Ugly and the Aesthetic of Failing on Purpose.
The deliberately sloppy look of many a meme now has a name.
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, and nobody cares if you can’t draw one.
This is, essentially, the focus of a recent paper by Nick
Douglas, the former editor of Valleywag who now runs the YouTube comedy
channel Slacktory. His work is published in the most recent issue of the
Journal of Visual Culture (the whole issue
is dedicated to memes). In his piece, Douglas tries to coin a phrase
that describes the messy, iterative, and, frankly, not all that
attractive visuals found on hubs like Imgur and Reddit and 4chan. He
calls it “Internet Ugly.”
The premise is that online art and memes aren't supposed
to be pretty. More than that, they're supposed to look messy. “There’s a
definable aesthetic running through meme culture, a celebration of the
sloppy and the amateurish,” he writes. “Its major
techniques over time have included freehand mouse drawing, digital
puppetry, scanned drawings, poor grammar and spelling, human-made
glitches, and rough photo manipulation.”
Douglas points to a few examples of Internet Ugly. There
are Rage Comics—a set of easy-to-mimic stick-figure drawings with text
slapped on top. Like many memes, Rage Comics are basically mad-libs with
badly drawn pictures. Anybody can grab the template and plop in
something that fits the little sequence. There is a whole cast of faces
present in rage comics, many of which are contorted versions of earlier
drawings.
There’s also a whole subset of work labeled specifically “shitty” something. Take Shitty_Watercolor,
for example, someone who painted intentionally bad pieces without
letting the watercolors dry. His renditions of things like President
Obama, the Costa Concordia crash, and scenic photos that users post to
Reddit made him one of the most popular Redditors around.
In
fact there’s a whole subset of "shitty" communities on Reddit. Things
like Shitty Earth Porn and Shitty Life Pro Tips and Shitty Food Porn
post photo parodies of their non-shitty counterparts. Here's a photo
from Shitty Earth Porn of "The iconic New York City skyline."
The
meme “Nailed It” is all about people trying to make something good, and
failing spectacularly. Most of these images compare and contrast the
desired outcome with the actual one. The worse the fail, the better the
meme.
In
his paper, Douglas argues that this ugliness is what sets Internet
media apart from everything else. You can make ugly Microsoft Paint
drawings, plop bad fonts onto worse pictures, and as long as you get the
lulz it doesn’t matter how good it looks. “As
opposed to media like TV or print, where the amateurish is marginalized
and audience attention centers on mainstream blockbusters, the Internet
is built to give outsized attention to the amateurish, the accidental,
and the surprise hit.”
Why has the meme-based web gone for
quantity over quality? A few reasons. The first is speed. Many of these
pieces are iterative, they respond to one another, and they happen on
threads that move quickly and in some cases are deleted within a few
days, or even within a few minutes. “Polish your reply in
Photoshop for an hour and the thread might be done before you are,”
Douglas writes. The second is that there’s nobody stopping someone from
posting their work. There aren't traditional gatekeepers, no formal
process of vetting anything. The approval comes in the form of shares
and comments and spin-offs. And the people doing that sharing and
jugging and iterating, ultimately, are fellow meme lovers who care more
about jokes than about shading and brushwork.
And, as with any community that has developed its own
aesthetic, there is the danger of someone co-opting it, of people
"selling out." Hot Topic has sold shirts with Rage Guy and other meme
faces on them. Politicians have used the Doge meme in their campaigns.
Reddit and 4chan users have lashed out at these attempts to use their
work, arguing that they are not only impostors, but don't fundamentally
understand the purpose and art that is Internet Ugly.
Not everybody who makes Internet Ugly content is actually a bad artist. In fact, the guy behind Shitty_Watercolor
is now actually pretty good at watercolor, something he attributes to
the amount of practice he got. But Douglas argues that Internet Ugly
isn’t going anywhere. “So long as some creators have more ideas than
capabilities, there will always be an Internet Ugly.”
theatlantic.
