Up until 1961, the words “painting” and “Campbell’s soup” would make little sense paired with each other. Yet mention these words together today, and chances are you will get one name in response. Deemed the King of Pop Art, Andy Warhol remade the art world in the image of American modernity – bright, streamlined, and infinitely reproducible. He aptly named his studio “The Factory,” as it churned out Campbell’s soup can prints and Brillo boxes that were so representative they were virtually indistinguishable from the parodied subject. Upon seeing his work, philosopher Arthur Danto was inspired to eventually pen his pivotal book After The End of Art, declaring that art as an aesthetic practice had given way to art as a philosophical pursuit.
The potency of Warhol’s reproducible silkscreen prints – from soup cans to celebrity portraits – is not accidental. In fact, if examined through the lens of cultural evolution, their runaway success would appear almost inevitable. As cultural artifacts, they demand attention.
Previously, we reframed value as the accumulation of attention rather than the preservation of aura per Benjamin. But attention itself is unevenly distributed. Some images spread effortlessly while others vanish. Why?
In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins proposes the concept of the meme: a unit of cultural information that propagates through imitation, just as biological genes propagate through heredity. Melodies, symbols, slogans, rituals, images – all are capable of behaving as replicators in the same way as biological genes.
Meme in this sense does not refer to the GIFs of dancing cats sent in the DMs of chat apps, although it is interesting to note that Dawkins’ original definition of the word has been superseded by its colloquial meaning. Cultural fragments persist not because they are true or virtuous, but because they are effective at being repeated.
The influence of cultural content, then, does not depend on origin, uniqueness, or institutional authority, or aura. Instead, it becomes a question of its fitness for transmission. An image survives insofar as it can move from body to body, mind to mind, space to space throughout time.
Dawkins’ model is deliberately amoral, in the sense that it does not prescribe value judgement based on some projection of rightness or wrongness. Memes do not propagate because they deserve to. They propagate because they exploit human cognitive tendencies: pattern recognition, emotional salience, narrative compression, rhythmic repetition, cognitive bias. Religious history offers abundant examples long before the term meme existed. The cross, the halo, the mandala, the relic, the pilgrimage route – these are not merely theological artifacts but extraordinarily resilient carriers of cultural meaning.
What is critical here is that replication precedes authority. Images become powerful not because they are declared sacred, but because they circulate widely enough to appear inevitable. Much like in search engine algorithms – where highly trafficked domains are assigned more relevance – authority follows repetition, not the other way around.
This inevitability leads an influential meme to gain value as it shapes a set of shared beliefs about what a culture finds important and meaningful. In some cases, it could be abstract concepts like individualism or kinship; in other cases, it could be as golden as McDonald’s arches or as plastic as Joan Rivers.
Reproducibility, then, does not erode value by itself. Rather, reproduction changes what kind of value an image can hold. In a reversal of Benjamin’s framework, the maintenance of value is actually amplified through reproduction, where replicating the original raises its exposure, accessibility, and thus its relevance. Permanence gives way to visibility, and relevance becomes temporary, contingent, and competitive.
From an evolutionary perspective, we see again that the enemy of meaning is not repetition, but apathy. An image loses power only when it is no longer repeated, no longer recognized, no longer carried forward by bodies willing to host it.
At this stage, though, image-making has not yet become coercive. Participation is still active – to repeat an image is to choose it; to pass it along is to affirm it. But the ground is already shifting. Meaning is beginning to detach from depth and attach itself to attention – a scarce resource that must now be competed for in the race for propagation.