Before there was Gloria Steinem or Michel Foucault, there was Dada. And it was deadly serious. Kickoff, Demolition time.
“Dada thrives on contradictions. It is creative and destructive. Dada denounces the world and wishes to save it.”
So says one narrator of journalist-filmmaker Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Council of Great Britain documentary on not just the international avant-garde movement called Dada but the associated currents of surrealism churning around that continent during the first half of the twentieth century.
“Dada wanted to replace the nonsense of man with the illogically senseless. Dada is senseless, like nature. Dada is for nature, and against art. Philosophers have less value for Dada than an old toothbrush, and Dada abandons them to the great leaders of the world.”
Christian art and philosophy by contrast recognize both dissonance and harmony. But dissonance is not the final, much less the only, word. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn. 1:5).
Subjectivism, Solipsism, Totalitarianism
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+ NPR’s campaign in favor of pornography by fake science
+ David Starkey: How Modern art Took a Dump on Western Civilization
+ Lee Fang “stuns Congress on Mass surveillance”
+ Senator Rand Paul on the Profits of War
2024. It is (not) finished.
Updated.
Catholic Critique 