Art Gallery Puking

Submission 23,774

About

Art Gallery Puking refers to a series of reaction images and exploitables of a man throwing up at an art gallery. The image has been used online to express disgust and as a template to convey opinions on different pictures by photoshopping various artworks into the image.

Origin

On December 26th, 2005, YouTuber kristoferpaetau uploaded a video entitled "Art Forum accident." As he explains in the description, "I started to feel really bad at the opening of the Art Forum 2005 Art Fair in Berlin. And suddenly I couldn't help myself, I had to vomit." As of July 2017, the video has been viewed more than 7,500 times.^[1]

Additionally, Kristofer Paetau blogged^[2] about the incident on his website Paetau.com. In the post, he uploaded a series of screenshots from the video with captions to describe what was happening.

Spread

On January 22nd, 2013, Facebook user Scott Scheidly posted the image of Paetau vomitting, adding the caption "This is my new thing! Going to art shows and vomiting in front of bad art." The caption, which as been documented on Twitter^[4] and other sources,^[5] has since been removed from the photo (shown below). Within four years, the post has received more than 837 reactions and 1,300 shares.^[3] When posted to FunnyJunk,^[6] the post received more than 53,000 views and 1,400 positive points.

Later that year, people began photoshopping the image to include different paintings. On February 13th, 2013 Tumblr user hipsteryisus^[8] posted the image with a portrait of Jesus Christ photoshopped into the image (shown below, left). When posted to the website Rebloggy, the image received more than 3,500 notes.^[9]

That year, meme center user, callmemike photoshopped Romero Britto's painting “Love Blossoms" into the image (shown below, right).^[7]

On July 11th, 2017, Redditor ShyCobra posted the image with a photoshopped picture of Megumin from KonoSuba into the portrait in the subreddit /r/MemeEconomy. The post received more than 6,200 points (88% upvoted) and 150 comments in eight hours.^[10]