Why The Art Museum Doppelgänger Meme is so Profoundly Addictive

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Most people walk around art museums to look at the art. But I often find myself reading the small blocks of text that accompany each piece, scanning for clues about the life and times of the person whose visage I’m looking at.

Through this practice, I’ve learned that the art models of history usually fall into two categories. The first are the nobles, aristocrats, and royals of ages past who had the means, stature, and ego to commission portraits of themselves. The second are those who, very often, were at the fringes of society—mistresses, peasants, sex workers, and laborers who either needed a quick buck, or owed a favor to an artist friend.

My vague interest in the back-stories of history’s art models is one I hadn’t thought about too deeply until recently, when a thread of photos appeared on Twitter depicting people who had found their doppelgänger in an art museum. These images weren’t a project of any one photographer or content creator, but rather a practice that disparate, smartphone-wielding museum visitors all apparently thought of independently.

There’s the long and dark-haired man who looks like a portrait of Spanish royalty; the bearded man in a North Face fleece jacket who resembles a collared priest in another paiting; and a young woman who has the same sad eyes as what looks like a young peasant girl she spied on a museum wall. Each is uncanny and haunting in equal measure. The account that originally aggregated and posted the photos in a thread had a philosophical take on the meaning—”what ifall of us already lived somewhere and had a life that was different from ours ??”—while others chalked the likenesses to mere genetics.

Whatever the cause, it would be easy to claim that so many people entering art museums looking for proof of themselves is confirmation of our age of narcissism—”This painting looks like me. Let me post it so people will look at me”—but I’m inclined to view it differently. That there was someone, centuries ago, who looked just like us suggests that he or she lived a life just as complex and important as ours. At the same time, it serves as a haunting reminder that the here and now is so fleeting. In that way, the doppelgängers are existentially humbling: We want to know their stories, because at a fundamental level, we sense that they are just like us.

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