ALL CAPS CUCUMBER QUEST UPDATE THOUGHTS BECAUSE I’M HYPE AS HELL:
– THAT BANNER IS SO CUTE
– I WAS CONFUSED BY THIS UPDATE UNTIL I REALIZED “THEY” MEANS COSMO AND NOT THE MAIN PARTY, WHOOPS (ALSO FURTHER CONFIRMATION COSMO’S NON-BINARY, NICE)
– ANYWAY CORDELIA IN A MAJOR ROLE!!! AND COSMO!!!
– CRYSTAL KINGDOM ALSO MEANS THE DREAMSIDE TV STUDIO WHICH MEANS PANCETTA AND PUNISHER PUMICE AND PERIDOT AND ALMOND FANGIRLING OVER PUMICE
– BUT IT ALSO MEANS PRINCESS AMETRINE! AND CUCUMBER’S GOING TO DELIVER PIANO’S LETTER TO HER
– WHICH MEANS THIS CHAPTER IS GOING TO BE HELLA GAY (AND TRANS)
– SPEAKING OF PERIDOT I MIGHT BE READING INTO IT BUT FROM THE DIALOGUE IT REALLY SOUNDS LIKE SHE’S NEVER BEEN IN THE CRYSTAL KINGDOM BEFORE???
– HOW LONG HAS SHE BEEN CORDELIA’S DAUGHTER? WHERE ARE HER PARENTS??? WHO COULD ABANDON THIS PRECIOUS CHILD
– ALMOST DEFINITELY HOPEFULLY NOT TRAGIC PERIDOT BACKSTORY THIS CHAPTER
– PERIDOT FINALLY JOINING THE CRYSTAL GEMS MAIN PARTY??? LOOKS LIKE IT FROM THE CHAPTER COVER
Don’t make art to show off (how special you are). Don’t make art to express yourself (throw a visual tantrum). Don’t make art to communicate (esp concepts. There’s little that’s more detestable than a concept that needs to be called a concept). Make art that helps you make art. Make art that helps you make sense out of things. Make the things that you want to exist next to.
Or people could make art for whatever they want? I enjoy your blog but this is mad pretentious.
make art because yesterday there were cheese sticks in the cafe. make art because peppermint tea exists. make art because the spine of your book broke. make art about breaking the spine. make art about the notebook you never use, maybe use the notebook. make art about her, make art because you are her, make art about kissing the mirror. make art about gender myths, make art about dogs getting married. make art that speaks of social constructs, and also maybe make that piece about cats in floral bowties.
make new art. make bad art. ignore the posts about “tumblr poetry,” write the hell out of cigarettes and ashes and kissing, use arial bold italics. ignore the posts about “indie girl singers,” sing about your lettuce and avocados in a husky voice, write countless pop songs about boys, write songs about being sexually inventive. ignore everything. dance because you made popcorn. cook odd dishes, be proud of it even if it’s ugly. be an actor only in subversive inaccessible plays, write plays because your friend wants to be satan and you might as well give her the role.
ignore posts like this. the internet is a time we have been able to see a massive shift in the accessibility of art, because now people from all over can be seen and heard and noticed – the same people who would have never had the option. people like me, who learned their art slowly, over many years, people who were new and bad first (i am still kind of bad). people like me who just wanted to create. who are poor queer cuban girls who want to show off i exist and am a person. who want to throw a tantrum, because no one else has ever listened. who has finally gotten a chance to communicate instead of being silenced. who writes sometimes in concepts because it’s fun and i can do that. and people like me who don’t have the time, who don’t have the money, who don’t have anything but a song or a painting or a dance or a stupid poem in our hearts and who just want to share that; even if it’s rotten, even if it’s a war cry, even if other people see it and flinch.
i will protect artists and particularly new artists with my last breath. i will protect your art about boys and rocket science and concepts and fragments. never be afraid to create. to make mistakes.
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:
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.
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