tumblr meme culture is really just a form of neo dadaism
I’d like to clarify:
dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain.
dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense - in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making - well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place - it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)
so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame - this site has some nice examples.
but from my perspective - there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing
in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement.
so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.
related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this
tl;dr: my generation is fed up with this bullshit, and the best way that we can express that is by shitposting. alternatively, dada was an early precursor to modern shitposting and we should all thank duchamp for signing a fucking urinal
a dear friend has given a perfect update to some of my phrasing, courtesy of their word replace extension:
you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:
shitposting is the deconstruction of hegemonic discourse through the use of the absurd and surrealism.
I’d also say that while Dadaism was obsessed with the technological aspects of Modernity, of newspapers, of industrial mechanics and factory made clocks, neo-dadaism (of which shitposting but also the increasingly broad reach of the New Aesthetic and net aesthetics) is obsessed with the technological aspects of our time, or at the beginning of our time.
As just a comparison, the Clock in Absurdist and Dadaist art is both a symbol of the uplifting beginning of industrial relations (as one of the first complicated machines made by manufacturers, as the symbol of mankind’s ability to triumph and analyze nature and better ourselves) and as the deified symbol of horrific modernity (of demarcated time, labor hours, the oppression of the working class via managerial time), Neo-Dadaism/Absurdism has a similar relationship with early computers, which both symbolizes the utopian attitudes which we entered the digital age with, and the horrifying period we live in now, where the Digital is ever present and semi-deified.
My favorite dada satire is probably from Georges Grosz who takes the kind of robotic modernist tube people of folks like Leger:
and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:
And it’s so so funny to me that there’s all kinds of Gen X artists out there creating art about the millennials on their damn cellumar phones who think they’re the inheritors of this aesthetic but really it’s people who use the Madden gif generator to shitpost because they’re taking the technology meant for a coherent purpose for a particular narrative and they’re breaking it and turning it back on itself.
Aside from color palettes and materials used, I see literally zero difference.
This is one of the top 3 best posts I’ve ever seen on tumblr and I’ve been here for years.
Love
My grandmother took several classes on Dadaism, and I attended them with her growing up. Then I took plenty of art history when I got my BFA in Illustration.
This post is 100% legit in their observations. I’m seriously impressed.
Duchamp’s Urinal was one of the most famous, well known Dada pieces ever made, and he made it purely to prove that literally anything can be art. It was all about ignoring the Establishment’s rules of what art was and wasn’t, - this is exactly the same thing happening in real time.
The way this piece starts is startling precisely because it’s so predictable.
“This women’s magazine explores the rough truth: professional women coming out of their youth have it hard. They were promised they could have everything, but under the influence of feminist slogans they threw themselves wholly into their office careers. But it turns out their careers aren’t that satisfying and they’re coming unhinged. Now some are thinking of dropping out. Several of the author’s professional class friends are dreaming of leaving the city to live a more domestic life.”
These were exactly the Atlantic articles Jezebel was rolling eyes at in the 2000s, Susan Faludi placed them central to the “backlash” of the ‘80s. Adapted as a movie, they were 1987’s Baby Boom, with Diane Keaton.
But I haven’t really seen one since jeez, 2007 maybe. Certainly not since the media went loopy circa 2010 or so. The Cut is a New York Magazine vertical, and I’ve noticed enough examples I count it settled that NY Mag is trying to own the wokeness hangover and be the pre-2010 “liberal, not loopy” you loved and miss. So it’s significant exactly how they’re walking it back here.
Just like their “haha guess we fucked up with all the mocking misandry” piece it’s not a full mea culpa but an off-ramp, a way for people to rationalize and narrate standing down without immediately rejecting their felt values.
After that formulaic opening it shifts to some feminist lashing-out: we’re unsatisfied at work because of the sexisms! The wage gap! Women feeling undervalued! But these bits aren’t very well tied to whatever point is being made, feels like a few paragraphs of feminist signaling softening the audience up for a not-terribly-novel inversion of Friedan: “the unsatisfied careerist is the new unsatisfied housewife!” One wonders what Faludi or 2000s Jezebel would say.
At no point does the article SAY you should have a baby but it does say your professional life will be bleakly unsatisfying and single-girl-in-the-city recreation (drinks! vacations! performative satisfaction on Instagram!) won’t fill the hole, nominates kids (and dogs! and sex! and activism!), “jokes” that Rory Gilmore maybe was into something in removing nose from grindstone and getting pregnant, and ends on a note urging you to invest your feminist hopes in the next generation.
So maybe there’s still too much anti-natalist headwind to come out and say it just now, but they’re tacking pretty close. Baby steps. ::rimshot::
The one striking thing, there’s no “biological clock” ticking in the background of this piece specifically about unsatisfied careerist women in their 30s as there absolutely would have been in previous iterations. Technology has bought women of that class another decade of fertility, maybe that’s finally been priced in to people’s expectations.
Oh another thing, you notice how it never makes an aside to showily acknowledge the distinct challenges of brown, or queer, or tbh not executive class women? Pre-2010, what did I say?
In 2015, a New York Times op-ed acidly observed that Yale University had spent $480 million that year on fees for hedge fund managers to grow the university’s already massive endowment—while spending just $170 million on tuition assistance and fellowships for its students….
In addition to Yale, whose endowment was a whopping $25.4 billion in 2016, the holders of these outsized endowments include Harvard ($34.5 billion), Stanford ($22.4 billion), Princeton ($22.2 billion), and MIT ($13.2 billion), as well as top-tier state schools such as the University of Michigan ($9.7 billion) and the University of Virginia ($5.9 billion). In 2016, the fifty wealthiest universities in the country owned $331 billion in endowment wealth—a figure equal to roughly triple the size of California’s state budget last year and ten times that of Pennsylvania.
Henry did it, Japan did it
Even Jacobins in France did it
Let’s do it! Let’s suppress the monasteries!
Me: you know, as fun as it is to calibrate the relative power of the emergent, ah, incest fandoms–
Also me: “wincest”
Me: –and antifandoms, I remember growing up when incest wasn’t really a live issue in any direction.
Also me: that’s not true, you’ve talked about how incest was the Supernatural Romance/Teen Insurrection equivalent of 80s YA, Flowers in the Attic and all that. Hell, Anne McCaffrey was writing the Rowan series in the 90s.
Me: but that was from a 70s original… that was also about children with psychic powers…
It’s been said before but if public libraries weren’t a fact of society and were proposed today they would be roundly rejected as pie in the sky communism
they started as private initiatives that were eventually nationalized as vital infrastructure and are maintained on inertia and constituency even as they and the role they were established to fill drift off in separate directions into the aether
more than either libertarians’ or statists’ idealism, that’s how things tend to go
lawyer probs: the growing number of people suddenly surprised that the aclu represents shitty people as well as good people because they didn’t have to read a bunch of aclu cases in law school.
That’s why I enjoy the ACLU’s work so much. You have to REALLY love civil rights to stand up for some of the shitty people the ACLU represents. Without them bringing those tough cases, though, where would the rest of us be?
The First Amendment equally protects those we agree with and those we disagree with. It protects Civil Rights marches and BLM protestors. It also protects the most deplorable among us.
Without the ACLU, and without the First Amendment protecting the most heinous and disgusting views out there, the Constitution also wouldn’t protect the protests and speakers we hold most dear.
This isn’t about right or wrong, or political beliefs. This is about policy. Our Constitution made the choice to protect ALL speech equally, lest ANY speech, good or bad, be suppressed.
THIS. I think everything you need to know about the importance/purity of principle of the ACLU is that I saw a meme on Facebook where someone had like Photoshopped an ACLU logo onto a burning office building and with some terrible caption like “We know what to do with Nazi sympathizers” and my immediate internal response was “the ACLU would defend your right to post that if the government tried to punish you for it. All the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.”
I don’t think there’s anything I’m so purely dedicated to the way the ACLU is dedicated to protecting freedom of speech.
The ACLU is pure lawful neutral. They’re here to make sure everyone gets equal protection under the law, even if that means defending people they’d otherwise like to punch in the face.
I think the lawful neutral label is really really apt, and also a good way to point out the precise way in which active liberals have sort of gotten the wrong idea about the ACLU.
It seems like a lot of people have kind of imagined the ACLU as a chaotic good. Righteous defenders of the left’s favorite causes, turning the very power structures that allow or actively create oppression (legislatures, the justice system) into tools against that oppression. And it’s totally understandable why, especially if you’re pretty young and have just gotten into liberal campaigns in the last 5-10 years why you might think of them that way. Because you’d see them doing these high profile cases and campaigns for things like LGBT rights and fighting the travel bans, and there are plenty of organizations that sort of do fit in to that type of mold–SPLC, HRC, Emily’s List, etc., all on varying points on the lawful to chaotic spectrum–so it’s easy to think it makes sense to lump the ACLU in with them.
But you’re right that the ACLU is much more of a lawful neutral, ESPECIALLY in the free speech arena. They’re just there doing the really not glamorous work of refereeing to make sure that oppressive government actors can’t silence anybody, which makes sure that organizations like SPLC and HRC have the ability to do their work without interference.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. H. L. Mencken
the ACLU’s robustness lately is such a heartening sign of American civic health I teared up typing that but let’s remember it’s a finite structure
they called it the “ACLJew”, and said it was a front for communists and stood up for criminals
the ACLU came out of the First Red Scare, after WWI when revolutionary energy was really bringing down governments and not just assassinating officeholders and there was a crackdown
and yeah it was a shield for radicals, in its last hugest waves of immigration America took in all sorts of oppressed workers from ‘48 and later revolutions, Ireland to Italy to the Baltic, shit got kinda nuts once they had a taste of victory in WWI and heard about the future in mother Russia
smashy smashy go the Palmer Raids, etc., and the second KKK (the Jim Crow tightening and a lot more were anti-lynching measures, to win back deference to the state) and that’s a threat to The Movement towards world emancipation
then the SECOND Red Scare and by that time it was red diaper babies (cradle communists, without the convert’s zeal) and arms-length-for-safety fellow travelers and honestly after the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 not much real support of the Moscow line though normies didn’t know that
ANYWAY the joke is a lot of their famous victories really WERE screens for Communism. NAACP v. Alabama (1958) that a political group couldn’t be forced to reveal its membership by the state, the NAACP was popular with rightthinkers everywhere outside Alabama – who would obviously pass a list off to mischief-makers, likely uniformed. But the generalizable precedent!
The Skokie Affair, the precedent that marching with Nazi flags (through a postwar Jewish neighborhood) isn’t violence and is protected expression. That must extend, by your own logic (the legal mantra) to Communist flags and marches but haha how goofy do you sound saying “those Jewish lawyers are just standing up for Nazis for their own communist ends!” and yet
Someone should bring up Matt Yglesias’ old “in a scandal, just make it clear you won’t resign and the party you’re lashed to will have to back you up” strategy
great historical analysis of working class physical culture in the contemporary US vs Xi’s China
The empire had fallen long before it collapsed. Corrupt elites ruled from a distance. Industry fragmented in slow motion, plundered by the rich and slowly pieced apart by foreign competition. For common people, the possibility of any sort of stable life slowly faded. The future itself seemed to recede into an impenetrable darkness, thick with the sound of some as-yet-unseen chaos slouching toward the present. The gap between the dim light of everyday life and that rapidly approaching night was filled with bone-deep madness. Tradition rotted from the inside out. Opiates muted the misery of ever-expanding unemployment and unrest bloomed in its thousand forms. Religious sects bloomed across the heartland. On the coasts, overburdened, underfunded cities sprawled outward even as their cores were flooded with unprecedented wealth. Slums spiraled in a fractal pattern around glittering ports. Foreign powers pressed inward from a distance, the military overextended and inefficient. Weaker armies fought asymmetrical wars against the empire at its edges. Corrupt officials were assassinated in broad daylight. Militias grew in the rural areas, filled with young, featureless men hoping to push out the foreigners and make a great nation strong once again.
TIL that H.G. Wells wrote a rulebook for miniature wargaming called Little Wars
(A Game for Boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty
and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books).
A… Little Wars game sees rival commanders bombard their
adversaries with matchsticks, fired with little spring-loaded triggers
in the tiny cannons. Careful measurements from where the matches land
decide the number of victims.
This is looked on with disapproval
by some modern war gamers, who prefer theoretical bombardments worked
out with distance tables.
Phil Barker, a celebrated deviser of
modern games, acknowledges Wells’s role in “showing it could be done -
and giving grown men an excuse to play with toy soldiers”.
But he
adds: “Combat was based on shooting solid projectiles at the figures.
Today, this would be discouraged because of the risk of someone getting a
projectile in the eye, but it was the chance of damage to the finish of
lovingly home-painted figures that led to the switch to less lethal
dice.”
People since the Hilton era of reality TV, certainly since the Kardashian, be all “we didn’t USED to pay so much attention to the petty doings of the vapid rich". Girl YES we did, that was the society pages. Same concept, same audience.
(My father was in the society pages once. As an old-for-America commercial city, Philadelphia had a respectable “society” presence, and he escorted some girl to a cotillion in the ‘50s.)
Course they had actual aristocrats to fill that role in Europe. The “jet set” of the ‘60s was basically air travel making it practical for American “society” to merge with the Eurotrash in seaside resorts, rather than the distinct continental and Vineyard-Palm Beach-Pasadena circuits they’d had before.
That kind of faded as time went on, maybe countercultural anti-rich-WASPiness. Maybe that as superstructure to the relative eclipse of heirs after the New Deal and publicly held Managerial Revolution. (Eclipsed by professionals, as “bright young things”, heroic engineers and surgeons, “yuppies”, “symbolic manipulators”, the “creative class”?)
Writings of the 80s often describe the period as particularly celebrity-obsessed, that always struck me as odd. Maybe we’re still swimming in that world and can’t notice the water. But Beatlemania was in the ‘60s, Hollywood celebrity fandom predates WWII. (I do notice that models seemed to become celebrities more in the 80s-90s, where now it seems more celebrities from some other field are used as models.)
I think I’m starting to realize that part of it is “celebrity” started filling that “society” niche. Part of it was celebrities claiming some authority(-from-authenticity) to intervene in society, especially in the “New Hollywood” of the ‘70s - Brando sending Sacheen Littlefeather in his place to the Oscars, Jane Fonda in Vietnam, Warren Beatty reminding America of its communist traditions. That’s when it became normal for movie stars to “have a cause”. And then into the ‘80s in music, Live Aid, Band Aid, Farm Aid, Bono. Fuckin’ Bono.
Of course, a lot of this just turned into charity-for-the-purpose-of-attention-getting, but how do you think all those society charity balls worked?
I suppose the transition moment from “society” to “celebrity” would be Henry Kissinger at Studio 54.
Of course actual royalty is still a thing, in the older-tilting supermarket tabloids. The Charles-Diana wedding in '81 was huge in the states, a lot of contemporaries linked that to cultural retrenchment after the '70s went off the rails (heterosexual monogamous monarchy, hard to top that for tradition).
And if now we’re back, on reality TV and Instagram, to gawking at the callow rich and their hangers-on, courtiers and courtesans, well, we’ve been there before.
During the American Revolution, printer James Rivington’s Gazette was something of a proto-NY Times: Manhattan-based, but with a broad circulation and the most international coverage in the colonies. It was also the biggest newspaper not to tilt to the rebels, first offering a platform to all factions and then increasingly Loyalist.
This was not universally well-received. Isaac Sears, the privateer-trader who organized the merchants of New York into the Sons of Liberty, pushing back against British regulation which cut into their profits and backed by the threat of mob violence, described Rivington thus:
He would appear as a leading man amongst us, without perceiving that he is enlisted under a party as a tool of the lowest order; a political cracker, sent abroad to alarm and terrify, sure to do mischief to the cause he means to support, and generally finishing his career in an explosion that often bespatters his friends.
I have known a Statute of Lunacy taken out, upon a degree of conduct less exceptionable than this I have described: If the relations of our politician, should find his estate wasted by means of his patriotism, and they choose to improve upon this hint, I assure them, it is heartily at their service.
They did not. (A “Statute of Lunacy” was the period version of involuntary psychiatric commitment)
The Sons of Liberty arranged a series of hanging-in-effigies of Rivington, complete with a poem by revolutionary poet Philip Freneau framed as a satisfying confession before the gallows, and he was arrested by the New York Provincial Congress.
This not availing, an angry mob besieged Rivington and his family, driving them to the safety of a British warship, sacked his office and press, and seized his lead type to be melted down and cast into bullets.
They then faced and wheeled to the left, and marched out of town to the tune of Yankee Doodle. A vast concourse of people assembled at the Coffee House, on their leaving the ground, and gave them three very hearty cheers.
A Parliamentarian battle flag, back after 350 years. This ultra-rare English Civil War battle standard, due to go on public display for the first time in three and a half centuries, was kept and preserved by 11 generations of the same English country family. It will be on permanent show at the National Army Museum in London as from this coming Thursday. (National Army Museum).
Cary’s own troop’s cornet was red with a creature in a barrel and the motto ‘come out you cuckold’ (Illustration 1) referring to the Earl of Essex’s notorious marital problems. The creature might be a ‘fox in a barrel’ or perhaps a stag or reindeer without his antlers.
The major’s cornet simply bore the motto ‘cuckolds we come’ (Illustration 2).
So there’s actually a 400 year old tradition of reactionary shitheads calling their opponents cucks?
