The Growing Charm of Dada

I mean... it's art, right? Different forms resonate with different people. Usually, trying to justify why results in either fairly personal statements that either apply to you (in which case they probably don't teach you much) or don't (in which case they don't get you any closer to understanding the appeal), or in very verbose and dense academic justifications that don't do much for the vast majority of people. I get the historical, linguistical, etc significance of Shakespeare, but I still find his plays painful to read/sir through and much prefer 20th century theater.

These things also change with age. As you experience various life events, works that didn't appeal to you in the past suddenly hold much more interest; and similarly, things that once seemed deep and insightful seem trite and superficial.

That being said, studying a bit of art history elevated my understanding of it all; understanding that pretty much all art is a dialog that the creator has with past works was a big key. To reuse my previous example, I still can't stand Shakespeare but at least now I get why his work is pretty significant.

If this helps illuminate, freshman year of college some friends and I started an informal Dada society from our dorm. The real motivation was because it was amusing, and was tied in with other amusing post modern genres like Theater of the Absurd, or post modern authors like David Ives and Italo Calvino (I guess in our minds it was all sort of on the same spectrum of "amusing post modern works"). We got together and read, and then sat around and had very random, improvised conversations with unusual moments of repetition, usually while drinking Sangria or something random like that.

It was definitely part of the fun/ random stuff you do in college, but the other half was also a belief that there was this new world of post modern interpretations, philosophy, literature that we had almost no exposure to before in high school, so it had its "seeing the Matrix" moments.

I think it's a relic of the interwar years and that it would have resonated more back then, almost 100 years ago. Now I'm chalking it up to just an interesting, amusing, exploratory phase you go through if you study philosophy and literature.

Once one has taken the obvious step of speaking truth to power there remains the more subtle and challenging business of speaking wierdness to truth.

> I would very much appreciate it if someone could explain to me the appeal of this art form

I think you might be expecting a bit much from an internet comment :-)

May I recommend you Ernst Gombrich's (more general) Story of Art instead, a standard and quite beautiful introduction to art history? I feel it's especially well-suited to provide the high-level "context" you were asking for.

https://www.amazon.com/Story-Art-E-H-Gombrich/dp/1439508747