Grumpy Cat is just one of the memes featured in The Art Gallery’s new exhibit, “What’s in a Meme?”

“What do a cranky cat, a K-pop star and the former U.S. Secretary of State have in common?”

These are the words on the welcome plaque at the entrance to The Art Gallery in the Art-Sociology building. The three cultural figures referenced, Web star Grumpy Cat, Korean singer PSY and American politician Hillary Clinton, might seem to have little in common. Yet all three have inspired Internet memes, which are now hanging on the walls of the gallery as part of the “What’s in a Meme?” exhibit.

The exhibit, on display through April 26, is structured much like a traditional gallery. Dim lights give the rooms a dampened mood, benches and armchairs provide places for visitors to sit, and small printed plaques hang next to the works, providing names and explanations.

The artwork itself, however, is unorthodox. Instead of Picasso and Rembrandt adorning the walls, Internet sensations such as the “What Does The Fox Say?” video and the “Bert Is Evil” meme series play endlessly on flat-screen TVs and wall projections. While sitting in an armchair in the exhibit, visitors can put on headphones and listen to the soothing sounds of YouTube viral videos “Charlie Bit My Finger” or “David After Dentist.”

The goal of “What’s in a Meme?” is to encourage visitors to think about memes and art in a different way, according to graduate student Kate Kula, who curated the exhibit. Defining “art” is complicated, she said, but an argument could be made in favor of classifying memes as art.

“Some of the works, I think, are extraordinarily well done and are the creations of obviously talented individuals, and some are home videos that are in our lives via total happenstance,” she wrote in an email.

As a graduate assistant at the gallery, Kula had the opportunity to develop and curate her first exhibit. After an offhand suggestion from a friend, she decided to seriously examine Internet memes.

“Many [memes] have become or are on their way to becoming cultural icons,” she wrote. “How could those not be worth looking at a little more closely?”

In choosing memes to display, Kula selected pieces that seemed especially interesting or insightful, she wrote. The Ryan Gosling “Hey Girl” series, for instance, offers social commentary on the inner monologue of a feminist, while the “Hipster Ariel” memes bemoan the mainstream, parodying hipster culture, according to Kula.

“The one thing they had to have in common was the ability to make me laugh,” Kula wrote. “Humor, to me, is the one constant in what makes a meme.”

Some of the memes in the exhibit could even be considered historic. The music video for PSY’s 2012 single, “Gangnam Style,” running on a projection loop in the gallery, became the first YouTube video to reach a billion views. Further into the gallery, another projection plays a 1988 video of President Ronald Reagan and his wife that the creator produced and distributed on VHS tapes before the rise of the Internet.

During the curating process, Kula tried to contact the memes’ creators, but many did not respond. Some of the memes were created and uploaded to the Web years ago, she wrote, while others have unknown originators.

To extend the exhibit’s Web theme, the gallery encourages visitors who tour “What’s in a Meme?” to use the hashtag #WiaM to suggest memes that deserve to be included in the exhibit. The memes will be updated based on visitor suggestions, Kula said, to make the exhibit more interactive.

Prompted by the questions on the gallery’s welcome plaque, visitors contemplated whether the exhibit’s memes could be considered art.

The editing involved in creating some of the videos and images qualify them as art, junior geography major Paul Shelton said.

“Those that create memes have artistic merit applied to those memes,” Shelton said.

Marissa Coscarelli had seen many of the memes through Tumblr and Facebook, but she never thought to consider them as art. She agreed that certain memes could be called art because of the way they are arranged by the creator.

“That’s editing, which is an art, because you’re making something entirely new,” the freshman hearing and speech sciences major said. “It’s your own creation because you’re giving it a whole new meaning and you’re just repurposing things.”

While the likening of memes to art is up for debate, the effect of memes on culture over the past decade is clear.

“I think memes are definitely entertainment,” Kula wrote, “but I do not believe that entertainment and art are mutually exclusive.”