Art makes the world beautiful and helps us express what words can’t, and not just our hopes, dreams, or fears, but also social tensions and collective identity.

Great art has the power to make us see, understand, and even adopt completely different perspectives. It has a deep psychological and cultural impact that can shape values and inspire movements.

Throughout human history, art has been a medium of connection and transformation, and this remains true even today, as the art movement evolves alongside our lives.

In the current digital age, with the Internet dictating the way we work, entertain, and communicate, art has also moved to the digital realm and become central to modern culture.

A major part of this contemporary expression that takes place online is memes, which dominate our social feeds, messaging apps, and even political campaigns. Given their unique ability to communicate complex ideas in a simple manner with brevity and emotional resonance, and then spread them rapidly and widely have memes gaining recognition as a prominent art movement.

While primarily playful, memes can also be satirical, critical, and even subversive. By utilizing memes in their artwork, artists can evoke emotions of anger, compassion, and solidarity. But more importantly, anyone can participate in the shared movement.

This has made digital art and meme culture a key tool in present-day conflicts, where they are used to shape narratives and drive support or dissent.

For instance, during the early days of the Russian-Ukrainian war, meme art was adopted as a crucial medium of expression and resistance. Artists and everyday users created and shared visual symbols tied to the experience of war across platforms, effectively shaping how the conflict was understood globally.

The internet has essentially become a new front line of art and symbols in conflict zones, where cultural meaning and political power intersect in unprecedented ways.

Turning Memes into Memory, Collapsing the Divide Between Digital Culture and Lived Reality

With memes being a living channel and record of cultural emotions and conversations, artists are increasingly adopting them as both tools and material. They remix them, incorporate them in larger works, or use them to critique culture, identity, and power structures.

Among modern artists using meme art to blur the line between digital culture and everyday life, Peyote is one who has been reframing memes as cultural artifacts with historical and emotional weight. By utilizing memes as a vital part of his art, he has been showing that the internet culture isn’t separate from real life but deeply intertwined with how people experience identity, community, and reality today.

This fusion materialized in his latest mural of ‘pepe with a balloon,’ which Peyote painted on a building in the war-torn city of Bethlehem, and recently created limited descendants of the piece on canvas for the interested parties, galleries, and public sale.

A widely popular meme, Pepe the Frog, was created by Matt Furie as a laidback character with the catchphrase ‘Feels good man’ for his comic series Boy’s Club. Since its origin in 2005, the meme has evolved significantly.

Initially, it was adapted on internet forums like 4chan and Reddit, but by 2015, the politicization of the Pepe memes resulted in its addition to the Anti-Defamation League’s database of hate symbols. A few years later, it was used by democracy activists in Hong Kong in protests.

Since then, Pepe the Frog meme has become a symbol of digital-era resistance, which Peyote has used to broadcast personal and collective experiences of suffering and resistance.


Image Credit: Peyote

His Pepe with a red heart balloon, a parody of Banksy's iconic "Girl with Balloon," gives voice to the loss of innocence, hopes, dreams, and love in Bethlehem, a city in the West Bank, Palestine.

Peyote also painted a Pepe with a butterfly in Gaza, taking inspiration from the “Is This a Pigeon?” meme, drawing on its themes of confusion and misidentification to critique willful ignorance in times of conflict.

By referencing internet culture in the real physical world, Peyote is commenting on the harsh reality of the world while actively shaping how digital culture informs lived experience, public space, and artistic perception.

This way, rather than being confined to museums or galleries, art lives in feeds, public walls, and shared imagination. And when these pieces are shared and reshared by millions of people on the Internet, they help turn local experiences into global symbols of struggle and connect people with distant conflicts.