If Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg were alive, they would have a blast with what’s going on with crypto and web3 today.
The plot thickens when it turns out that it’s Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin who outbid the ConstitutionDAO on the U.S. constitution [1]. Even the conceptual artists couldn’t have staged a more public / ironic / symbolic work.
This stuff is absurd, which makes it so great. So great that I think it deserves a term -- Dada3, which pairs well with web3.
Dada and Neo-Dada
As a reminder for those of us who were not art majors --
“Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (c. 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris.
…
Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works.” [4]
In short, this is Dada:
Marcel Duchamp: Fountain, 1917 [5].
It’s so stupid and so genius at the same time (depends on your world view I guess). How can an everyday object so mundane be high art?
Then in the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns began to do a series of riffs and challenged the concept of painting. They used new processes, whimsical objects and focused on “anti-aesthetic”.
I was at Whitney’s Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror [3] retrospective yesterday and saw the Painted Bronze, a 1960 hand-painted bronze sculpture of two cast cans of Ballantine Ale [7].
Jasper Johns: Painted Bronze, 1960
Johns painted it because he said to his dealer, Leo Castelli, “Somebody told me that Bill de Kooning said that you could give that son of a bitch two beer cans and he could sell them. I thought, what a wonderful idea for a sculpture”. So he made a bronze sculpture and then it’s in MoMA’s collection and in Whitney now.
It reminds me of another Rauschenberg’s piece I saw at MoMA [9].
Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953
This has to be one of my favorite art of all times. Dude just went to the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning and be like - can you give me a painting of yours? I want to erase it and have Jasper Johns frame it and call it art.
Absurd Problems Require Absurd Solutions
Dada was a reaction to the horrors and absurdity of the first world war. In the 950s, Neo-dada was a response to the rise of popular media and modern technologies in a way.
Isn’t it so fitting that we can have the term and movement Dada3 as a response to the absurdity of the aggregating power of the internet?
The ConsitutionDAO [11] is a wonderful conceptual art piece in itself.
The NFT bay [10] riffs on the absurdity of NFT pricing [12].
And of course there are the meta riffs of someone making art out of the act of calling out absurdity.
VincentVanDough @Vince_Van_Dough
Please provide ETH address for donations. The crypto community would love to help preserve this critical infrastructure for decades to come. https://t.co/ncY223yFwyAll this absurdity, the community riffing and improvising -- is an art movement by itself. And let’s call it Dada3.
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