About

Statue Profile Pictures or Statue PFPs refer to Twitter accounts that use photographs of Greek and Roman statues as their profile pictures. As the practice is popular with accounts that post about Western traditionalism and are critical of modern society, jokes and memes about "statue PFPs" and "statue avis" have become popularized online, not unlike memes about anime profile pictures.

Origin

On Twitter, so-called "statue PFPs" or "statue avis" refer to social media accounts that use photographs of classical statues as their profile pictures. The accounts often post about traditionalism and are critical of modern society, juxtaposing values of traditional societies against those of today. Some of the most-subscribed "statue PFP" accounts are @culturaltutor^[1] (1.1 million followers, created n May 2022), @Culture_Crit^[2] (254,700 followers, created in May 2020) and @AlpacaAurelius^[3] (265,900 followers, created in November 2018) (profile headers shown below).

Jokes about "statue PFPs" have been posted on Twitter at least since March 2018. On March 28th, 2018, Twitter^[4] user @KrangTNelson posted the earliest found notable joke about the account which gained over 80 retweets and 1,000 likes in five years (shown below).

Spread

The trend of ridiculing "statue PFPs" achieved higher prominence in 2020, when several tweets gaining traction. For example, on August 21st, 2020, Twitter^[5] user @Chinchillazllla posted a joke that gained over 910 likes in two years (shown below, left). On September 14th, 2020, Twitter^[6] user @bad_takes made a tweet that garnered over 440 likes in the same period (shown below, right).

The trend achieved further popularity in late 2022 and early 2023 as several "statue PFPs" accounts amassed significant following in Twitter. For example, on October 17th, 2022, Twitter^[7] user @laserboat999 posted a meme that gained 250 retweets and over 3,600 likes in four months (shown below, left). On January 17th, 2023, artist @Witts_Art tweeted^[8] a Silence, Brand reaction image targeting "statue PFPs" that gained over 2,000 retweets and 14,500 likes in one month and has since been used as a reaction on Twitter (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References