pop arts do refer to pop as in popular, but that's more of a modern reference to "mainstream", capitalist commercial copy pasta factories, manufactured pipelines for gimme cash now & quick, and make sure that pipeline never stops flowing. until the commercial ugu sinks so deep you want to vomit at every new track & artists that hits your screen.
but i mean, pop is also a defined art form applied to any medium.
your edges are clearly defined & bolded. using bright tones without gradients or blending. a focus on simplicity and even over simplicity. and (imo most importantly) a focus on anyone anywhere being able to understand this piece of work, and take something from it.
meme culture is modern pop culture, and in many ways, it's become the main art form that leads society above others.
it's actually a pretty intellectual and pinnacle art form, that makes it very simple for anyone to express common socio-poly-econ values very quickly, simple, and with a lot of irony, stire, and really important now adays for art is humour. and being able to make fun of it all, and everything, and some kind of cohesive survival instinct.
@ktsukik What gets more thinkyfun is how memes affect language which is the manner of expressing complex feelings outside of visual art. So the feedback loop continues, and you get metamemes and metametamemes until they themselves become normalized into the language. The galaxy brain meme is a good example of this form of expression.
@ktsukik I think memes are often used cleverly, but I'm not sure I'd often consider them *intellectual* (aka things that make people question/think), in that most of the time they're used to reinforce rather than query structures and groupings. The purpose of most, say, anti-laissez-faire-capitalism memes is not to highlight more flaws in the system or ask what can be done about it all, so much as (like you say) to build in-group solidarity between people who already agree the system is broken.
@ktsukik And it moves as fast as the internet. No one wants stale memes. The dankest memes are the freshest and most relateable, poignant...