💥 When value becomes image: a perspective on #MemeCoins e #PopArt

The relationship between meme coins and Pop Art is not metaphorical—it's structural. Both emerge in different contexts but respond to the same central question: what gives something value when everything can be infinitely reproduced?

Pop Art, in the 1950s and 1960s, broke with the idea that art needed to be rare, elevated, or distant from popular culture. Artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein took mundane images—soup cans, comic strips, repeated faces—and placed them at the center of the art system. The gesture was simple and radical: if it circulates, it matters.

Meme coins do something similar in the realm of money.

They don't seek legitimacy through classical economic foundations. They don't promise deep technical innovation or immediate concrete utility. What they offer is symbolic circulation: strong imagery, repetition, humor, collective recognition. Like Pop Art, they assert that value doesn't arise solely from function—it arises from visibility.

The meme as financial ready-made

If Duchamp turned a urinal into art by shifting its context, meme coins do something similar with money. They shift value from the territory of institutional seriousness into the realm of memes, irony, and digital culture.

In this sense, a meme coin functions as a financial ready-made:

• not creating a new object,

• not inventing a new function,

•

just re-presenting something existing under a different logic.

The meme is the medium.

The attention is the engine.

The community is the foundation.

Why PEPE Coin is a Pop experiment

PEPE Coin is especially interesting because it emerges from a character that already carries a complex cultural history. Pepe the frog has traversed forums, social media, political appropriations, and constant reinventions. By definition, he is a symbol in flux.

By becoming a coin, #PEPE doesn't "gain utility." It gains scale.