The video compares the creation of memes to Warhol's Factory in overdrive, but I think that's only the second half of the story. I associate Warhol with the manipulation of already popular images. By either forcing you to reexamine those which are so ubiquitous you tune them out, or by repeating iconic images until they're meaningless. Definitely an apt comparison for what happens after a meme becomes a meme. But to me, the fascinating part is how something becomes a meme in the first place, as they often start out as images no one has seen before. This, I think (possibly only because I'm young and have very little knowledge of art history :P ), is more similar to the even more recent trends of street art. Shepard Fairey creates images and then posts them everywhere until they're burned in the back of our retinas. Memes are really more like that in overdrive. It took André stickers years to really catch on, but an image macro can now be spontaneously thrust into the internet's collective unconscious in a matter of hours. I don't even remember where I was going with this, but I find that really cool. If there is or if there ever will be worthwhile art to be found within memes, then they absolutely are an expansion of the ethos behind the street art movement. It's an inversion of the traditional workings of the art world. Instead of going to a museum to find art, the art will find us.
It's obvious that a meme can't exist in a vacuum, it needs replication to survive. This is similar to some of the street art, as newgameplus points out. Because of this, I do see a parallel between some street art a and internet memes. Both are just extensions of marketing, which imo has become the most finely tuned art form in the world. Marketing is where the most talented artists get pulled and we are left with a bunch of lazy, less ambitious "artists" creating memes and other nonsense. There was a time when an artist worked for years to hone his craft. This "time" still exists, it just migrated to Madison ave.
British Historian R.G. Collingwood might say that internet memes are the performance of emotion and not it's true expression, making meme makers ranters and ravers and not actual artists. That actually makes some sense..
-That about sums it up for the most part.
Art is doing shit you do not need to do to survive.
Not sure if it makes sense or not but there seems to be a method: bizarre, dark but slightly funny. Is this art? Definitely not imo.