Quote - > Quote - However, he, as well as other dadaists, were not really making art qua art, but rather statements about art.

 

It's arrogant enough to say, "This is art."  Putting your turds in a can and saying, "This is a STATEMENT about art" - well, that's big brass balls, especially if people ooh and ahh over it.  Bunch of nonsense, In My Ever So Humble O-Pin-I-On.

 

I think that, to a large extent, the dadaists served the same role within high art as the punks served in pop music -- puncturing pretensions and delivering a much needed emetic.  And what's wrong about having brass balls when poking fun at the status quo. We tend to forget that many of the more outrageous of the avante garde never thought that they would be venerated, or become part of the collections of major museums. They displayed in shows at the NYC Armory, or galeries in Paris, and tweaked the nose of the art establishment. To borrow the emperor's new clothes analogy, they often were the ones who were having fun at the emperor's expense (in one way or another). 

So what is art? What, for that matter is music? Does attractiveness have a role in it? (Does it have to be attractive/aesthetically pleasing to be art? Does it have to be pleasant to listen to, to be harmonius to be music?) For myself, "modern art" often speaks to me in a very different way than 18th century art does, just as modern music speaks to me differently than older music.