Memetics is an arts research lab, but not only in the narrow sense of interpreting works or tracking institutions one by one. We study the durable systems that shape cultural survival: funding flows, geography, labor, criticism, public policy, institutional strategy, and the evaluative regimes through which some expressions are elevated while others disappear. The current public projects focus on philanthropy and infrastructure because those systems can be measured clearly with public data, but the scope of the lab is broader and meant to endure: building an empirical account of how art gets selected, supported, and made durable in an age of abundant production.
Every domain has its own selection apparatus. In science, it is peer review and citation networks. In law, precedent and judicial authority. In media, editorial judgment and algorithmic distribution. In the arts, patronage, curation, and the slow accumulation of institutional endorsement. These systems share deep structural properties—concentration, path dependence, the disproportionate influence of a few gatekeepers—but they are rarely studied as instances of the same phenomenon.
AI is collapsing production costs across every domain it touches. That transformation is exhilarating for some and existential for others—particularly for artists, writers, and other cultural workers who are watching the economic foundations of their practice erode in real time. The anxiety is legitimate. But the harder question underneath it is structural: when making things is no longer the bottleneck, the systems that decide which things matter become the binding constraint. And those systems were never neutral to begin with.