shitposting and the dadaist movement:
a thread that nobody asked for

so i've been writing a paper on memes because liberal arts school is a joke and i found something very interesting that i wanted to share. i had heard about the dadaist movement before but i just thought it was stupid/pretentious (which it is) but it's also more. let's dive in

on my paper i'm studying a popular shitpost and trying to analyze its humor which is...kinda hard. considering the point of shitposting is that there is no point (foreshadowing). the art of it, or the humor, is inside the existence of the meme itself. no more explanation needed.

that's a bit hard to conceptualize for people who aren't part of shitposting culture. what makes something's existence funny and another thing's existence not funny? i've seriously encountered shitposts that are quite literally about just a letter. epitome of comedy right ¿?

i've read threads before on how memes are becoming increasingly more meaningless or nihilistic, and i've certainly seen that become a thing too. it's not that shitposts are jokes without context, it's that the context of the joke is not in the meme but ~all around us~

i mean this in the sense that part of what makes a good shitpost is the repetition aspect of it but also in the sense that there have been studies on the increase of these posts in the last years. in fact, there are some who claim that 2016 saw shitposting at its peak

a rise in nationalism, classism, sexism, etc. in the '16 saw people disappointed by society, the mood started to go completely to one of total absurdism. and i'm not talking about 2016, i'm talking about the year of our lord 1916. or, as some would call it, when dadaism was born.

dadaism was an art movement in 1916, which happens to be post ww1 era. the lack of mobility between classes, human rights violations and shitty politics in general saw a small group of swiss artists wanting to make shitty art as a response. or, more than shitty, just a no-art

the war really opened a lot of people's eyes about what ~truly matters~ and these artists reached the conclusion that there was no more inherent value in a fancy bourgeois painting than a toilet when it comes down to it, not when the real world is so harsh and unforgiving

that was pretty much the philosophy of the movement. a real dadaist was against dada. they gave the world the art it deserved. it was all reactionary to its historical context, and i think that's something people tend to forget to talk about when touching on this subject

when i learned about that and how similar it is from shitposting philosophy, it really opened my eyes on the bigger picture. especially on the fact that they even mimic each other in the decades and historical context they became popular in

for example, there was a thing called "readymade" art which is when you just grab a common object and call it art. kinda how ppl find stock images, regular videos, etc. from the internet and "meme" them. we see a lot of this in fashion today too, "camp" style becoming so popular

another interesting parallel between the two is the role of race. pretty much the people who were having the breakdown were white europeans and they claimed in their art that they "needed a new skin color". and so began to play with around with blackness as that alternative

of course many people denounce that today as racist, since the way they went about their white guilt was pretty tone deaf. but it's really interesting how we see a little bit of that happening now too with black memes / fashion black face / etc. https://hyperallergic.com/219063/we-need-a-new-skin-color-the-racial-imagination-of-dada/

shitposting and dadaism could be almost twins as they relate to art. there are many parallels in the philosophy, expression and political context behind it. if you would like to read more, i highly rec this article which was the inspiration for this thread https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/17/18142124/shitposting-memes-dada-art-history