Occupy Facebook With Art

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Part of a series on Facebook / Meta. [View Related Entries]

About

Occupy Facebook With Art is a chain copypasta and social networking game in which the participant is asked to find and share an image or video of an artwork by an artist that has been specifically assigned to him or her via Facebook Timeline. Since its viral breakout in January 2014, the copypasta has spawned numerous variations replacing "art" with other types of media and disciplines, including poetry, celebrities, music and movies.

Origin

In late 2013, Facebook users began posting a copy and paste message urging other users to share works of art on their timelines. On December 20th, the earliest-known version of the message was posted by Facebook user Rizzo Ratso, who shared a painting by artist Joshua Hoffline.

The next month, the following variation of the message began spreading across the social networking platform:

"The idea is to occupy Facebook with art, breaking the monotony of photos of lunch, sushi and sports.
Whoever likes this post will receive an artist and has to publish a piece by that artist with this text."

Spread

On January 6th, the "Odarka's Poetry Page" Facebook feed published a status update with a variation of the copypasta urging users to "fill Facebook with poetry."

On January 27th, the tech news blog Binary Smash^[3] published an article which praised the chain messages for exposing people to new artists. On January 29th, the Egyptian news blog Cairoscene^[4] published an article about hijacking the Facebook chain message to promote Egyptian art and artists. On January 31st, Blogspot^[2] user Mhsts published an article with several notable works of art posted by Facebook users spreading the copypasta meme. On February 2nd, artist Mike Harman^[5] highlighted several works by artists submitted to participants in his Facebook copypasta post. On February 7th, The Washington Post^[1] published an article about the copypasta, which criticized some Facebook users for using the meme to be elitist. On February 12th, The Independent^[7] reported that Facebook users were spreading images of actor Jeff Goldblum using a variation of the "occupy Facebook" message (shown below).

On February 18th, Redditor BreakFlare left a comment revealing that he had seen a version of the copypasta urging other Facebook users to post photographs of actor Nicolas Cage]

"The idea is to occupy Facebook with pictures of Nicolas Cage, to break the monotony of photos that aren't of Nicolas Cage. Whoever likes/comments on this picture will be given a mood and has to post a picture of Nicolas Cage in that mood."