Not the predominant art form maybe, but I think they could have fundamental importance to a sophisticated culture. A culture that takes memes seriously, that can publicly acknowledge and defend/reconcile itself with truths that memes can so often reveal and illustrate so brutally efficiently (at times, not always) may be much more powerful than one that (often) dismisses them due to triviality / "fake news", or (~secretly) uses them to dismiss inconvenient facts (or, simply doesn't really take them seriously, etc).

Memes, the non-visual ideas kind (inaccurate generalizations, "fact"oids, figures of speech, cognitive norms if you don't mind stretching the definition a bit, etc) play a huge role in human communication, but this is so fundamental that it seems to be sub-perceptual and thus evades our attention and consideration.