When Art Stopped Caring About Humanity (Dada)

National Review Online ^ | February 25, 2015 | David Pryce-Jones

[C19fan]

The centenary of the artistic movement known as Dada is coming up in 1916 and it ought to produce a lot of nonsense. The word “Dada” is supposed to come from the Kru language in Africa, and refers to the tail of a sacred cow. Up till then, the purpose of art had been to say something about humanity, and how to be a human being. Dada had the contrary purpose that there is nothing to say about human beings. The artist’s mockery and nihilism is supposed to be proof of his superiority to the stupid public.

[C19fan]

Geneva, birth place of Dada, will try to cash in on art tourism dollars which is probably going to cause Dada artists to roll around in their graves. If you want a very nice readable overview of Modernism I would recommend Peter Gay's "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy". One of major thesis in Gay's book is only in liberal societies with a large bourgeois class could Modernism, many of whom railed against the middle and upper classes, have the breathing space and financial support to thrive. My take is there were experiments against the traditional way of doing things that were made many failed but some with great success like the Impressionists, Cubists, and composers like Stravinsky. Some of the modernists like Kandinsky and Malevich were very affirming of the spiritual quality of man. The fact that Dada was dead by 1930 says something.

[IronJack]

If you can't raise the bridge, lower the river. If you can't hurdle the bar, lower it. If you have no talent, change the rules of the art form until you become an artist.

It's interesting that the post-Modernist trend is coming full circle. Read Jurgen Habermas's theory of post-post-Modernism, in which he essentially admits that a world without any transcendent standards is liable to be a hell on earth.

[Jeff Chandler]

The statue outside the Orange County Museum of Art perfectly illustrates the modern artist's attitude towards the public:

.

[C19fan]

Combined with the inhumane brutalist structure.

[RedMDer]

Only Four days to go until March!


FReepers, Let's GIT_R_DONE!

[Liberty Valance]

dada ping

[NorthMountain]

the inhumane brutalist structure.

That's the sort of building a telephone company would erect to house a remote, unmanned switching station. Go back far enough (late 1800s, maybe not even that far) and even the houses for unmanned equipment had some elegance to them.

[a fool in paradise]

Anti-art has since become the post-modern entirety of the art establishment.

[blueunicorn6]

“Refers to the tail of a sacred cow”

Close, but no ceegar. It refers to the part of the sacred cow under the tail.

[PoloSec]

There is very little ART today; most of it can be classified under communist propaganda.

[Dr. Thorne]

'Nuff said.

[mjp]

Of them all, James Joyce was the only one with real talent, but Finnegan’s Wake, that unreadable effusion, shows how Dada had got to him.

Joyce and Dada are good examples of the disintegrated mode of thought. This anti integration mentality is the end result of Kantianism. It rejects all previous approaches to art, such as classicist,Romanticist, and Naturalist alike.In politics, this mode of thought leads to nihilistic libtard policies such as egalitarianism, social justice,justice as fairness,and environmentalism, which will eventually destroy prosperity.

[jobim]

Old Pablo was one of the great Modernist womanizers, and used Cubism to dismember the ladies he was attempting to discard into the rubbish heap. Degenerate Moderns by E. Michael Jones is spellbinding.

[Mad Dawgg]

"Old Pablo was one of the great Modernist womanizers, and used Cubism to dismember the ladies he was attempting to discard into the rubbish heap."

The other bit about Pablo and the other Painting Masters of that time (Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, etc.) was that photography was becoming popular and painting realistic human and still life and landscape works was quickly being upstaged by the new technology. So they realized they had to do something unique or become "old hat". So then you get Impressionism, Cubism etc.

[Republicanprofessor]

I disagree. Picasso was a sexist user of women, but I think sometimes the distortion in his works showed his love of all the erotic parts of a woman, shown all at once, rather than his dislike of women.

The analysis of his pre-cubist Demoiselles d’Avignon, shown a few posts above, would take too long here. Again, it is rather sexist, but it is also strongly painted and revolutionary in terms of space.

Remember, the camera had been invented in 1839, and from that point on, artists were free to be much more subjective in terms of style because they did not have to be tied to realism any more. Abstraction is a fascinating study, but not one to be done quickly.

[Republicanprofessor]

What unfortunately is lso happening, with all the socialist emphasis on postmodernism and political theorizing in art, is that the graduate students and curators nowadays are driven by political theory instead of visual analysis. They don’t know how to look at paintings formally and tend to see all styles equally because they can’t analyze the difference between a strong use of form and content and weak socialist drivel.

[dfwgator]

My definition of art, “If it’s something I could do, it ain’t art.”

[goldstategop]

I was never fond of Dada... but I do like surrealism.

[dfwgator]

I was never fond of Dada

"That's two D's, two A's....and one gun!"

[jobim]

Are you familiar with Jones’s thesis? He compiles a chronology of Picasso’s philandering and attaches it to contemporaneous paintings to find the correlation between discarded mistresses and their appearance on canvas.