"If a work can be called “art” simply because its author claims it to be such, then there is no such thing as art."

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Oh you wacky NRO people! Only nearly a century late!

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:23 (twenty years ago)

Can these people help when they were born or when they bothered to take interest in this issue?

― Red Jacket, Friday, 31 March 2006 17:30 (twenty years ago)

The word “Dada” means “nonsense.” In fact, that’s what a lot of Dada art really is.

?????????????????

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:33 (twenty years ago)

i love right-wing art criticism. (did we ever figure out if ben domenech wrote his own paean to creed or swiped it from somewhere? either way, it was great.)

i like how these cycles of rediscovery (or re-re-rediscovery) are so predictable. and every time dada comes back, there's always an elizabeth fisher to be appalled.

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:36 (twenty years ago)

To any artist, whether abstract or representational, the presence of a urinal in an art exhibition should be an insult to his craft.

Use the coffee shop next door.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:37 (twenty years ago)

The word “Dada” means “nonsense.” In fact, that’s what a lot of Dada art really is.

Woah, now steady on there, pardner

― Dadaismus Is A Very Magic Fellow (Dada), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:37 (twenty years ago)

Not as good as the objectivist art crit forum I happened upon one day. They still hate Jackson Pollock which is cute and ironic (CIA promotion of non-objective art to combat Stalinist realism, etc.).

― Big Willy and the Twins (miloaukerman), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:38 (twenty years ago)

Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.

Tzara must have been reading some large-print newspapers back in the day.

― Big Willy and the Twins (miloaukerman), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:42 (twenty years ago)

You terrible man. I followed the link. I read the article. My brain is leaking.

― Fluffy Bear Hearts Insipid Online Magazine (Fluffy Bear Hearts Rainbows), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:43 (twenty years ago)

ronery???WTF???
http://corner.nationalreview.com/

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:54 (twenty years ago)

it's a team american reference.

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:59 (twenty years ago)

team america, that is.

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Friday, 31 March 2006 17:59 (twenty years ago)

oh, okay.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 31 March 2006 18:00 (twenty years ago)

(becz you see they're "south park conservatives" -- they don't get dada, but they do get making fun of michael moore for being fat.)

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Friday, 31 March 2006 18:07 (twenty years ago)

Stupid person in "writing stupid article" shockah.

― Robocock (noodle vague), Friday, 31 March 2006 18:12 (twenty years ago)

Hmmm . . . perhaps there is something we can do about this -- what should we call it -- "degenerate" art?

― phil d. (Phil D.), Friday, 31 March 2006 18:16 (twenty years ago)

Seriously, though, explain to me why I can't get a picture of me with my dick in one of these springy cat toys into a gallery:

http://www.petdiscounters.com/files/images/d_1074.jpg

Isn't that just as good as a urinal for shock value?

― Tipsy Kafka, Friday, 31 March 2006 18:25 (twenty years ago)

the best thing is when avant garde and neo cons play the same game for different purposes--hilton kramer on everything in the last 25 years comes to mind (ie warhol and boredom, richard tuttle and intangibilty, etc)

also, i look forward to the day when privelged art discourse gets sad and dies

― anthony, Friday, 31 March 2006 18:45 (twenty years ago)

and whenever i get a place to put things on walls, ill put the photo up, of the cock and the cat

― anthony, Friday, 31 March 2006 18:46 (twenty years ago)

The word “Dada” means “nonsense.” In fact, that’s what a lot of Dada art really is.

Not all of it though - some is poppycock, piffle, and balderdash.

― o. nate (onate), Friday, 31 March 2006 18:47 (twenty years ago)

the sentence quoted in the thread title is like a matrix moment. she can see the world around her crumbling and beyond it the VOID.

which makes me think that nro accounts of psychedelic drug experiences would be even more great.

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Friday, 31 March 2006 18:50 (twenty years ago)

"Seriously, though, explain to me why I can't get a picture of me with my dick in one of these springy cat toys into a gallery.
Isn't that just as good as a urinal for shock value?"

Yes, but was the urinal originally chosen for shock value?

"Dadaists want to have it both ways: To thwart aesthetic criticism, they insist that their art is nonsensical and even “anti-art.” Yet they also want to be taken seriously, claiming their art has a moral charge to reveal the hypocrisies of their society. What Dadaism represents is the origins of 21st-century moral relativism."

I don't agree with this. I would hope that Marcel Duchamp would want to piss all over that urinal if he saw such reverence toward it.

― nicky lo-fi (nicky lo-fi), Friday, 31 March 2006 19:06 (twenty years ago)

See, the mistake you're making here nicky is bothering to engage with the article.

― Robocock (noodle vague), Friday, 31 March 2006 19:09 (twenty years ago)

i think duchamp would find the reverence hilarious. dada's assimilation is kind of its ultimate victory. and she's of course right that dada is a cornerstone of relativism. it's no accident that it came within a decade of e=mc2.

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Friday, 31 March 2006 19:09 (twenty years ago)

and within a half-millenium of copernicus!

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Friday, 31 March 2006 19:18 (twenty years ago)

I thought engaging with the articles is the new punk rock?

― nicky lo-fi (nicky lo-fi), Friday, 31 March 2006 19:21 (twenty years ago)

and within a half-millenium of copernicus!

arf arf. but you could argue, if you wanted, that duchamp (1887-1968): einstein (1879-1955) as michelangelo (1475-1564): copernicus (1473-1543).

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Friday, 31 March 2006 20:14 (twenty years ago)

i wonder if they'll have her cover the 1937 'degenerate art exhibit' in munich next

― geeta (geeta), Friday, 31 March 2006 20:32 (twenty years ago)

I could only manage the first two paragraphs - they're among the worst opening paras I've ever read in any kind of article.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 31 March 2006 21:01 (twenty years ago)

I like how a person who seems to have just become aware of the existence of Marcel Duchamp considers themselves qualified to determine what is art.

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Friday, 31 March 2006 21:16 (twenty years ago)

It's highly likely that her readers are in the same boat.

― Sparkle Motion's Rising Force, Friday, 31 March 2006 21:26 (twenty years ago)

er "herself"

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Friday, 31 March 2006 21:36 (twenty years ago)

Dadaists want to have it both ways: To thwart aesthetic criticism, they insist that their art is nonsensical and even “anti-art.” Yet they also want to be taken seriously, claiming their art has a moral charge to reveal the hypocrisies of their society. What Dadaism represents is the origins of 21st-century moral relativism.

Oh right, because there's no moral relativism at play in, say, starting a World War.

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Friday, 31 March 2006 21:52 (twenty years ago)

I almost always carry around a Sharpie or some other marker with me, and sometimes sign urinals in public restrooms "R. Mutt"

― Austin Still (Austin, Still), Saturday, 1 April 2006 02:10 (twenty years ago)

ha hahaah! silly article writer! hee hee!

― Mr Jones (Mr Jones), Saturday, 1 April 2006 03:22 (twenty years ago)

the main problem here is that the fountain is really pretty. if duchamp had signed something ugly then she might have a point.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Saturday, 1 April 2006 03:56 (twenty years ago)

Also, the fountain was not actually a readymade. Duchamp apparently -- historians have recently suggested -- had it made to his specifications. It doesn't match up with any other urinals mass produced.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 1 April 2006 07:10 (twenty years ago)

Haha, Kansas is apparently more enlightened than we thought:

http://www.harpers.org/ThatsTheMatterWithKansas.html

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Sunday, 2 April 2006 04:59 (twenty years ago)

That's the Matter With Kansas
Posted on Thursday, March 30, 2006. From a proclamation issued December 27, 2005, by Dennis Highberger, mayor of Lawrence, Kansas, which calls itself the “City of the Arts.” The thirteen days of commemoration were chosen by rolling dice and picking numbers out of a hat. Originally from Harper's Magazine, March 2006.
Sources

WHEREAS: Dadaism is an international tendency in art that seeks to change conventional attitudes and practices in aesthetics, society, and morality; and

WHEREAS: Dadaism may or may not have come into being in the summer of 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire at 1 Spiegelgasse in Zurich, Switzerland, with the participation of Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Marcel and Georges Janco, Jean Arp, and Richard Huelsenbeck; and

WHEREAS: The central message of Dada is the realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole; and

WHEREAS: Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions; and

WHEREAS: zimzim urallala zimzim urallala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dennis Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas, do hereby proclaim the days of February 4, March 28, April 1, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 16, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 1, October 17, and October 26, 2006, as “International Dadaism Month.”

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Sunday, 2 April 2006 05:00 (twenty years ago)

"zimzalla zam" should have been the third whereas clause. otherwise, the way it reads now, it's reactionary.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Sunday, 2 April 2006 05:19 (twenty years ago)

besides, they misspelled it anyway.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Sunday, 2 April 2006 05:29 (twenty years ago)

Why not sneeze?

― Rredd Selavy (Ken L), Sunday, 2 April 2006 11:02 (twenty years ago)

The whole Einstein/Picasso relativity/relativism thing: there's really not much to it.

― Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Sunday, 2 April 2006 11:55 (twenty years ago)

I'm guessing that a) this article is one of those not-ready-for-the-actual-magazine things, much like the stuff by S.T. Karnick we all know and love, and that 2) it's written for the NRO readership who might be "intelligent" (if home-schooled) yet unaware that there was this GUY who put this URINAL in MUSEUMS and RUINED EVERYTHING.

― Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Sunday, 2 April 2006 12:17 (twenty years ago)

I also recognize that the Dada movement elicited some echoes in more serious poets of the era, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound — but Tzara is no Eliot, no Pound.

i.e. he didn't move on to more "serious" intellectual pursuits like espousing anti-semitism.

― m coleman (lovebug starski), Sunday, 2 April 2006 12:25 (twenty years ago)

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