1The Covid-19 pandemic prompted a flurry of more or less absurd social media challenges. Videos and photographs of internet users juggling toilet rolls (#stayathomechallenge) and dressing up in pillows (#pillowchallenge) went viral during lockdown. One such challenge, launched by the Instagram account Tussen Kunst & Quarantaine (Dutch for “between art and quarantine”), proved a particular hit, inspiring internet users stuck at home to use whatever they had to hand to reproduce famous works of art.
- 1 The URL for the publications and Python code used for the textual analysis are available online at: (...)
2This article seeks to account for the challenge’s viral success while offering a fine-grained analysis of the range of productions it generated. It draws on quali-quantitative methods, as theorised in particular by Tommaso Venturini and Bruno Latour (Venturini & Latour, 2009). We began by looking at the two Instagram hashtags most widely used for the challenge, #tussenkunstenquarantaine and #guettymuseumchallenge, downloading the almost 80,000 publications1 still available on the platform with the online webmining tool minet (Plique et al., 2019) and organising them with automatic image and text processing software. Visualising the regularities in the corpus let us grasp the broad-based dynamics underlying the dissemination of the hashtags while keeping the singularity of each image in view.
3It is fair to say that many of the images seem conventional, offering somewhat uninspired takes on works from the canon of Western figurative art; it is tempting to consider such takes as signs of a moribund culture. Yet a detailed study of the photographs reveals the vitality of the hybridisation between the tableau vivant tradition and the practices of self-display typically associated with Instagram. This article therefore takes as its starting point the hypothesis that the virality of memes during Covid may equally reflect a form of vitality.
4The Instagram account Tussen Kunst & Quarantaine was set up on March 14, 2020, by three women living in Amsterdam. The Netherlands had encouraged the population to stay home to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. On the day of its launch, the account published eight pictures and a set of rules for taking part:
Online museum for homemade art. To join:
1. Choose artwork
2. Use 3 household items
3. Tag @tussenkunstenquarantaine
🚫photoshop
5The rules did not specify what sort of art participants should choose, though the eight accompanying pictures were all pictorial references. Over half were takes on Dutch and Flemish paintings, by Robert Campin, Johannes Vermeer, Vincent van Gogh, and Piet Mondrian. Six of the photographs were of women. The rules and examples kicked off the challenge. It was quickly picked up by the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam account and took off in the week of March 23, 2020 (Mazoyer, 2023, p. 56), when it was relayed by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
6Tools designed to sort similar images into sets2 were used to identify posts featuring the same painting. The graph below [fig. 1] compares the popularity of the most widely copied images. One image on the graph represents around 70 images posted on Instagram.
Figure 1
Diagram made in 2024 and illustrating the popularity (by number of images) of the most widely copied works in the corpus. Authors: Martine Créac’h and Béatrice Mazoyer.
Source: Instagram, between 2020 and 2023.
7The popularity of Vermeer’s Milkmaid and Girl with a Pearl Earring seems to suggest that the challenge circulated particularly widely within the Netherlands. Using a language recognition tool (Joulin et al., 2016) to study the text alongside the images sheds light on the logic behind the challenge’s circulation: The Milkmaid correlates strongly with texts in Dutch (28% of texts whose language was able to be identified), Girl with a Pearl Earring less so, at just 8%. At 4%, Dutch is over-represented in the corpus as a whole compared to the percentage of speakers worldwide. The sheer diversity of languages in the dataset points to the virality of the challenge, according to the definition outlined by Karin Nahon and Jeff Hemsley: “the message spreads […] to different, often distant networks” (Nahon & Hemsley, 2013, p. 16). Marie-Alix Molinié-Andlauer, Florence Andreacola and Marie-Christine Bordeaux developed a typology of participants and pointed out that participation reached a broader public than “the familiar circle of art and cultural institutions” (Molinié-Andlauer et al., 2023).
8As the challenge spread, internet users dropped the reference to the original account, Tussen Kunst & Quarantaine, along with the three-object rule. Images using the hashtag #gettymuseumchallenge began to circulate independently, outside the original context of creation, thereby becoming memes. François Jost makes a distinction between memes, or “adjunctive figures” adding elements to the initial image, and parodies, or “substitutive figures” which “call on the viewer’s memory” (2018, p. 68). It is hard to know where to classify the images from our corpus in this typology: some are montages with original and lockdown version side by side, while others just feature the latter, relying on the audience’s art knowledge. What makes these images memes is not so much the paintings they reproduce, but the “construction of a moment” (Jost, 2018, p. 84) in which life comes to a standstill for lockdown, making it possible to stop and strike a pose.
9In reproducing images drawn from the visual arts using real people in frozen poses, the photographs published on Instagram perfectly match the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the tableau vivant as “a silent and motionless person or group of people posed and attired to represent a well-known character, event, or work of art.” Their popularity can be linked to their exemplary embodiment of the general effect of movement captured in a single image—“the painter has but an instant,” in the words of Diderot, “and he may no more include two instants than two actions” (1984, p. 54)—and, specifically, the “suspension of time” that is both Lessing’s “fruitful moment” (1997, p. 120-121) and the cessation of movement imposed by lockdown. The tableau vivant came into being well before 2020, “though the term itself is not attested, it seems before 1838 in France (prior to that date, the terms used were tableaux mis en action and tableaux fugitifs)” (Vouilloux, 2002, p. 15). Kirsten Holmström (cited by Bernard Vouilloux) demonstrates that the genre owes much to monodrama (a play in one act for one character, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion being the prototypical example) and to the art of drawing-room poses, inspired by Lady Hamilton (Vouilloux, 2002, p. 15). Such poses “were held to be in connection with the art of Antiquity […], though the connection was rather distant from the original in that it was no ‘slavish’ copy of specific works, but rather an exercise in stylised recomposition inspired by Antiquity” (Vouilloux, 2002, p. 18). The earliest known tableau vivant is thought to be the 1761 reproduction of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s L’Accordée du village [Village Bride], posed by the Italian actor Carlin [Carlo Bertinazzi] midway through Act II of Noces d’Arlequin [The Marriage of Harlequin] the same year as the painting was shown at the Salon.
10The expression “tableau vivant” came to be used in rhetorics and poetry as early as the late seventeenth century and in dance treatises by the mid-eighteenth century (Ramos, 2014, p. 17). The tableau vivant is characterised by its hybridity, “between pictoriality and performativity, between a sophisticated art form and entertainment” (p. 17). By the nineteenth century, the tableau vivant had become mere “social entertainment, more or less connected to the scenic arts” and a “public spectacle,” as Bernard Vouilloux has shown, its aesthetic inviting the real bodies of performers to freeze in a pose to “make a tableau,” i.e. a painting.
11Given that the “performer’s real body” connects with the “simulacrum of the image,” tableaux vivants were very early on ironically described as “spectacles of morts vivants [the living dead],” stirring “a kind of feeling of fear” (Halimi, 2014, p. 325). Should it therefore be argued that their modern updating on screens, the constant repetition of the same references to Western figurative art, are a sign of a moribund culture? On the contrary, our hypothesis is that the virality of memes during COVID may in fact reflect a form of vitality.
12This vitality is shown in the sheer range of paintings chosen by participants for the challenge. The graph shown at fig. 1 shows how many times the most popular paintings were picked for the challenge, but they still represent just 0.5% of the overall corpus. The graph does not include all the other works, which are too numerous to fit onto a single page.
- 3 See for a list of museums.
- 4 “Frida Kahlo/Diego Rivera. L’art en fusion” opened at the Musée de l’Orangerie on October 19, 2013, (...)
13Leaving aside individual works of art to look at specific artists, it is clear that the challenge foregrounded dynamics specific to Instagram. Applying an algorithm recognising named entities (Qi et al., 2020) reveals Frida Kahlo as the third most widely cited artist in the posts, behind Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. Yet not a single French national museum3 has hosted an exhibition on Frida Kahlo since 2013.4
14Frida Kahlo’s Instagram celebrity reflects and plays into the hyper-exposure of her face, sometimes described as “Fridamania,” and critiqued for overshadowing the allegorical and political dimension of her paintings (Zavala, 2017). However, the choice of her self-portraits also reflects the number of women taking part in the challenge, itself doubtless determined by the over-representation of women on Instagram (Blank, 2022, p. 67-78) and their greater participation in the cultural sphere on social media, compared to men (Pacouret et al., 2024).
15The strong presence of women may well also explain why Leonard da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine was the second most widely chosen painting, ahead of the Mona Lisa. Our hypothesis is that this unexpected reversal is due to the position of the sitter’s head, shown in a three-quarter profile (like the Girl with a Pearl Earring, which proved twice as popular), matching a selfie pose. Alise Tifentale and Lev Manovich’s “Selfiecity” (2015, p. 109-122) demonstrate that Instagram selfies have become a photographic genre in their own right, with their own specific codes. The authors observe that women typically adopt more “extreme” poses, accentuating the turn and tilt of their heads.
16This hypothesis arose because studying images from the challenge made it clear that pose was a crucial element in choosing and copying original works. Internet users were able to experience transmitting art without the mediation of language. Carole Halimi demonstrated that in the context of the theatrical tradition of tableaux vivants, the body has “performative status,” (2014, p. 327) citing Antonin Artaud to the effect that theatre can be a means of disseminating “the physical knowledge of images” by means of the “communicative power” of gestures (1958, p. 80-81).
17Yet this transmission also paradoxically underscores the link between sites of lockdown and museums, both being spaces in which, in Cole Swensen’s fine expression, “time can remain alive”:
Museums are often thought of as, if not dead places, at least places that harbor dead things, or at least things from the past. That’s not true, but it comes from a vague but elusive recognition that museums have a very strange relationship to time. They allow time to continue out of time; they allow time to reignite. They’re not timeless spaces, but places in which time can remain alive. (Swensen, 2020, p. 277)
18The constraints of lockdown were a challenge to creativity. The Instagrammer Elsa Labouche’s image in homage to Diego Velazquez is a case in point.
Figure 2
Left: Diego Vélasquez, The Infanta María Teresa of Spain, oil on canvas, 1652-1653, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Right: Elsa Labouche, Self-portrait in lockdown with bed linen, clothes horse, shelf, washing up tray, crockery, ironing board, pillows, bed cover, skirt, wool, coat hanger, newspapers, delicates laundry bag, jewellery, aluminium, paint, plastic bag, cardboard, hazard warning tape, tea towel, sink filter, saucer, clips, pins, sticky tape and staples, inspired by the portrait of Infanta María Teresa, 2020.
Source: Instagram (www.instagram.com/p/CAu0V6NF4Ol/).
19The material elements listed by Elsa Labouche compensate for the image’s virtuality while parodying detailed museum labels. Interestingly, the varied list of materials associated with lockdown can be brought into dialogue with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s considerations in Wild Thought on bricolage, rooted in an initial constraint:
All these heterogeneous objects that constitute his treasury are interrogated by him in order to understand what each of them might “mean,” thus contributing to defining a set still to be created […]. But these possibilities still seem limited by the particular history of each piece and by what subsists in it as predetermined by the original use for which it was conceived, or the adaptations it has undergone for other uses. (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 2021, p. 22)
This ambivalence plays into what he describes as the “poetry of bricolage”: the poetry of bricolage also, and above all, comes from the fact that it does not limit itself to accomplishment or execution; it “speaks,” not only with things […], but also by means of things: recounting, through the choices it makes among limited possibilities, the character and life of its author. Even if he never completes his project, the bricoleur always puts something of himself into it. (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 2021, p. 25)
20This discourse on the bricoleur’s self, laid out in 1962, can in 2022 become a feminist manifesto for the bricoleuse in lockdown, whose sphere of activity has shrunk to the kitchen and laundry room.
Figure 3
Left: René Magritte, The Son of Man, oil on canvas, 1964, private collection. Right: Dolph Klainberg, Unknown Title, 2020.
Source: Instagram (www.instagram.com/p/B_qep7EBi4q).
21The parody version and the gap it opens up between the original model and the take with a twist gives rise to an inventive space that turns images into connections between people, and between art and life. The face hidden by an anti-covid mask rather than an apple, as in Magritte’s painting, reveals what covid-19 took from us—the world outside, reflected in the upside-down pan-as-mirror, and youth, the elderly man’s wrinkled skin countering the youthfulness of Magritte’s model. The use of the smartphone enables citizen photographers—to borrow Laurence’s fine expression—to “speak of data ‘by oneself’ rather than ‘being spoken’ by big data” (2015, p. 159).
22In connection with museums, reproducing images can above all become a powerful means for creating forms of attachment and care for others in a time of covid-19 lockdown (Gefen and Laugier, 2020). Transforming Hamlet’s drowned Ophelia painting into a toddler in a paddling pool reduces the rich floral decoration of John Everett Millais’s pre-Raphaelite masterpiece to two flowers in the water. On the other hand, it brings in the arm of the person supporting the child’s head. In the context of the pandemic, this functional role takes on an ethical value of care for others that resists the critique of narcissism levelled at such reproductions. Children locked down with their parents are key characters in the set of memes: Marie-Alix Molinié-Andlauer, Florence Andreacola and Marie-Christine Bordeaux point out that they feature in almost one-third of images analysed (Molinié-Andlauer et al., 2023).
Figure 4
Top: John Everett Millais, Ophelia, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 111.8 cm, 1851-1852, Tate Britain, London. Bottom: asteroninsta, Unknown Title, 2021.
Source: Instagram (www.instagram.com/p/CLeCbGPHHGo/).
23As an indoor scene, Caillebotte’s Floor Scrapers lent itself well to lockdown takes. The photograph at fig 5 (bottom) takes up the same high-angle shot, hiding the sky for the characters on their knees on the floor, though the gaze of one participant changes the meaning of the scene dramatically. Caillebotte’s painting, drawing on Diderot’s explanation of the means of combatting the falsity of representation and the theatricality of figuration (Fried 1990), closes the painting off from the viewer’s presence (“the canvas encloses all space, and there is no-one beyond;” Diderot 1965, p. 792); otherwise, the painter would create a work “in as bad taste as an actor addressing the stalls.” By contrast, in the context of Fried’s anti-theatrical analysis (1990, p. 11) and contemporary theatrical and artistic practice, the photograph opens up the canvas to establish a connection between the mischievous expression of the foreground character and the viewer, breaking the fourth wall.
Figure 5
Top: Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers, oil on canvas, 1875, musée d’Orsay, Paris. Bottom: Marie René, Les raboteurs de parquet de bois-co [The bois-co Floor Scrapers], 2020.
Source: Instagram (www.instagram.com/p/B-zmb34KGQU/).
24The bond of complicity with the distant viewer, in lockdown like the characters in the photograph, can be created by humour. The pledge of commitment centred in the Dutch Primitive painter Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait becomes a warning gesture, a sort of modern Noli me tangere befitting a pandemic. The character’s expression and the accompanying text underscore the message: “*No social distancing rules were broken in the making of this masterpiece*.”
Figure 6
Left: Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, oil on oak panel, 1434, National Gallery, London. Right: Ant & Dec, Art Meets Dec, 2020.
Source: Instagram (www.instagram.com/p/B-sGB0clFqg/).
25In conclusion, Bruno Latour’s proposition that we should “consider the web both as a poison and as the remedy for the poison” (2020, p. 14) seems doubly relevant in accounting for tableau vivant memes. The challenge was used by museums to keep in contact with audiences, becoming a symptom of what Stéphane Jouan has termed “the cultural hyper-offer” (2020, p. 108-109), or “a race for heads of institutions to produce ever more spectacles for ever more spectators, with the aim of proving the ‘impact’ of culture (to the financial authorities), while undermining the impact by the sheer fact of offering more and more” (Citton, 2020). Yet the amateur nature of #tussenkunstenquarantaine movement, begun by women and men in lockdown, also reflects an engagement with culture on the audience side. The meme, itself a symptom of social isolation during the covid crisis, was also a way of creating and maintaining human connections. Such encounters via the intermediary of art reproductions can be read as ways of reacting to the concerning “crisis of sensibility” (Morizot & Zhong Mengual, 2018) now characterising our relationship with the world.