‘All Pleasures Are Guilty Pleasures If You Have High Enough Anxiety’: 22 Classical Art Memes That Are Historically Relatable

Olivia Arocena • Writer and Editor

Oct 11, 2026 12:30 PM EDT

The absurdity of being human might be the only thing that has prevailed

The internet turned classical paintings that were once considered culturally elevated into a language for expressing the most ordinary feelings.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a painting. And it's much easier to identify with an ancient depiction of suffering than to actually articulate what's happening to us in real time.

Memes allow us to say 'this is me' without the burden of organising our feelings into phrases that contain the word 'I'. I like turning art that was once considered high-brow into something banal. It's a way to interiorize it and keep it alive. Plus, I don't necessarily think those feelings considered more 'noble' or mythical are actually more valuable than the ones we feel every day.

I also don't believe that some forms of cultural adaptation or reappropriation degenerate the original product. In a way, they might make new people interested in something they otherwise would not be exposed to. Or maybe they were exposed to it but couldn't make it their own. Classical art memes certainly provide a platform to claim the monumental feelings expressed in those paintings as your own.

These memes are doing today what the institution that elevated them never intended, and that is, to me, the best destination works of art can achieve. It's where they become popular and a real part of today's narrative.

Think about the Odyssey, which has been around for almost 3,000 years, and it has led many cultures to create different works of art and discourses around it. We have different film adaptations, paintings, literature, and of course, memes. That is precisely how the book remained a part of Western culture: through the many ways people have reinvented it over the years.

Probably, if my grandmother hadn't read the children's version of the Odyssey to me when I was 6, I would've never been interested in reading more about it later, or I wouldn't have understood it.

So knowing all that, we might become less snobbish when it comes to memes or watered-down versions of famous works of art, because in doing so, we create conversation, and culture stays alive.

We should be more worried about AI than about ridiculous acts of creation by people online. Seeing these paintings, all I can think of is how magnificent human creativity is, and how important it is for us as humans to preserve it.

Going back to the source of these memes, I realize how much time and effort people put into depicting desire and human passion without moderation, and how important that is for the human soul, especially in the current landscape, where most of what we see is advertising or generic content reproduced ad nauseam.

So I hope this meme list makes you laugh at the absurdity of our suffering and contemplate how humans have suffered for pretty much the same things throughout history. Enjoy!