Released just weeks before Halloween, the ad showed O’Donnell in front of a dark backdrop saying, “I’m not a witch,” and became a meme. Her campaign responded with an ad from Fred Davis whose Los Angeles-based firm Strategic Perception had compared Barack Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in a 2008 ad. A young Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate in the race, said in 1999 she dabbled in witchcraft in high school. The 2010 race to fill Joe Biden’s Senate seat in Delaware was rocked after Bill Maher aired footage from his old show. The man also made an appearance in a sequel painting, “You Are Not Forgotten,” in which Trump steps on the head of a snake, a biblical allusion. The defeated man on the bench represents everyday Americans, McNaughton explained. Sean Hannity bought the original painting and Trump would use the phrase “forgotten men and women” in his 2016 campaign messaging. 2010’s “The Forgotten Man” was his reaction to the Affordable Care Act and shows Barack Obama stepping on the Constitution. Note: Items are listed in approximate chronological order, not ranked in order of importance.Ī Thomas Kinkade for the MAGA crowd, Jon McNaughton paints pieces unappreciated by art critics but adored by fans. This list of the 101 political memes, art, and visual rhetoric that defined the 2010s attempts to put the decade’s images in context. Consider: of all the social networks Russia used during its attack on the 2016 campaign, it was the photo-sharing app Instagram - itself a product of the ‘10s, launched in October 2010 - that received the highest engagement. Perhaps six-second Vines and infinite scroll killed our attention spans, but making a quick, powerful visual argument is as important as ever. The novelty of a president sharing a meme has worn off and single-use Twitter parody accounts no longer get written up about. Today, internet culture is simply culture. This decade saw a radical transformation in how we connect and communicate, and it also saw the mainstreaming of internet culture. adults used at least one social media site back in 2010, but now, 72% do. The percentage of Americans who own a smartphone rose from 35% in 2011 to 81% in 2019. After all, we saw and shared many of these images while scrolling through our newsfeeds.
The story of our politics this decade can be told through images, and we have the rise of smart phones and social media to thank. It was a decade when internet memes became a form of political expression and bystanders with camera phones became amateur photojournalists. We watched the 2010s unfold through gifs and image macros.