Between Two Salads: Yung_Nihilist talks memes and Kanye West

It's hard to define what a meme even is. Quinta Brunson, icon of a Buzzfeed golden era of the early 2010s, has a theory. And Art Historian Ara Merjian has compared memes to "aesthetic - or anti-aesthetic strategies" of the German anti-fascist art movement.

As Merjian says: "An aspect of the meme that is celebrated in progressive circles is its collective, almost authorless shareability. In that regard it’s related to the utopian thinking of some members of the early twentieth- century avant-garde—that there would be a progressive death of the author, as the artist’s hand and individual voice became less important... individual voices and different political subcultures can be subsumed into a kind of hegemonic culture.... Dislodgement and displacement are the very engines of meme-making. The form remains the same, while its framing is changed. That operation creates irony. That’s how memes work. They’re defined not just by their iterability, but also by irony. And that relates to what we could call an avant-garde genealogy of collage and the readymade, of objects and images that are dislodged from their original context and thereby ironized."

The idea is that the way memes are made and then shared can be viewed as inherently creative and even radical.

But the fact is, memes are among the top driving forces of communication and culture today, and we're all still kind of trying to understand the phenomenon. I don't think we'll entirely understand them until an unknown time in the future, when we're able to view them retroactively.

Fortunately, until that day comes, I was able to speak with Bianca Perez, also known on Instagram as Yung Nihilist (@yung_nihilist). We talk "edgelords," Kanye West, and birth order. We also play the "Kim Kardashian: Hollywood" video game.

In addition to making memes, Perez is also a collector of online oddities and absurdities. We talk about her accumulated experiences and observations while creating one of the most unique spaces on social media.

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