(full article at the source)
What do you see when you look at Three Young Musicians, a group portrait by the French artist Antoine Le Nain in 1630? Are you struck by the rich colours, the fine brushwork – or by the fact that the three men might be a 17th-century version of Hanson, the sibling pop group from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who recorded “MMMBop”, one of the most annoying hits of the 1990s?
For Lucy Redoglia, the social media manager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), the Hanson comparison trumped any considerations of the picture’s artistic merits. She attached the words “Mmbop, ba duba dop” – an approximation of the song’s lyric – to a photograph of the painting and distributed it on Snapchat, a social media platform whose average user is aged 18. The resulting meme was viewed more than 60,000 times on Snapchat and shared extensively on other social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
Referencing Hanson’s ‘MMMBop’ 1997 single hit; and the 2004 film ‘Mean Girls’ (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)