Classical art memes are oddly captivating to modern viewers. We don't really know why, but our generation loves to take old artwork that only a handful of us recognize and completely destroy it by adding irrelevant captions. While they're a horrible idea, they're pretty hilarious, and worth the shame they bring upon us. The artists behind these are long dead, and while they'd definitely hate what we're doing with their work, that's totally okay, because it's a new evolution of artwork for the modern era.

While it's an unpopular truth, many of us don't have the ability to focus on genuine artistic works from the simpler times, and instead we'd prefer to see these in a museum. These memes horribly destroy their original source material, taking paintings someone intended to be serious a long time ago and proving they didn't quite age the same. Here are 23 of the best memes from classic paintings.