Lo-Fi Paradise @lo-fiparadise - Tumblr Blog

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world war 1 soldier in a trench: damn this really is the dark souls of wars

another soldier next to him: what the fuck are you talking about

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maaarine

morecashforads

brainstatic

This is the best description of South Park (and their brand of apathetic conservatism) I ever read.

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clocked

happynewfears-deactivated201701

go the fuck off

meta-xylene

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space-samurai

kasael-deactivated20250929

tumblr meme culture is really just a form of neo dadaism

kasael-deactivated20250929

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

kasael-deactivated20250929

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:

gayasscommie-deactivated2017090

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.

sam-keeper

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.

mizulyn

I think you might be onto something…

Aside from color palettes and materials used, I see literally zero difference.

blackwoolncrown

This is one of the top 3 best posts I’ve ever seen on tumblr and I’ve been here for years.

play-dolls

Love

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glassaxolotl

Will forever reblog

perpetuallurkernazanin

I’m so happy to have found this post. The other day I had to explain Dada-ism and got as far as, “An art style that emerged after WW1 in response to the atrocity of the war, that intentionally makes no sense… And there was this urinal.”… Which, glad to confirm was basically on the right track tho rudimentary, but… Wow, to then find this wealth of a post!

girlwithalessonplan

I love teaching dada poetry btw. Shibi dog (wow much bork) is practically dada.

youngsamberg

the duality of man

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frozenspots

I’ve opened my team rocket folder that has been shut for years….. there are over 90000 images out of context like this:

and I think it’s beautiful

frozenspots

part two

carolxdanvers

So somebody on my Facebook posted this. And I’ve seen sooooo many memes like it. Images of a canvas with nothing but a slash cut into it, or a giant blurry square of color, or a black circle on a white canvas. There are always hundreds of comments about how anyone could do that and it isn’t really art, or stories of the time someone dropped a glove on the floor of a museum and people started discussing the meaning of the piece, assuming it was an abstract found-objects type of sculpture.

The painting on the left is a bay or lake or harbor with mountains in the background and some people going about their day in the foreground. It’s very pretty and it is skillfully painted. It’s a nice piece of art. It’s also just a landscape. I don’t recognize a signature style, the subject matter is far too common to narrow it down. I have no idea who painted that image.

The painting on the right I recognized immediately. When I was studying abstraction and non-representational art, I didn’t study this painter in depth, but I remember the day we learned about him and specifically about this series of paintings. His name was Ad Reinhart, and this is one painting from a series he called the ultimate paintings. (Not ultimate as in the best, but ultimate as in last.)

The day that my art history teacher showed us Ad Reinhart’s paintings, one guy in the class scoffed and made a comment that it was a scam, that Reinhart had slapped some black paint on the canvas and pretentious people who wanted to look smart gave him money for it. My teacher shut him down immediately. She told him that this is not a canvas that someone just painted black. It isn’t easy to tell from this photo, but there are groups of color, usually squares of very very very dark blue or red or green or brown. They are so dark that, if you saw them on their own, you would call each of them black. But when they are side by side their differences are apparent. Initially you stare at the piece thinking that THAT corner of the canvas is TRUE black. Then you begin to wonder if it is a deep green that only appears black because the area next to it is a deep, deep red. Or perhaps the “blue” is the true black and that red is actually brown. Or perhaps the blue is violet and the color next to it is the true black. The piece challenges the viewer’s perception. By the time you move on to the next painting, you’re left to wonder if maybe there have been other instances in which you believe something to be true but your perception is warped by some outside factor. And then you wonder if ANY of the colors were truly black. How can anything be cut and dry, black and white, when even black itself isn’t as absolute as you thought it was?

People need to understand that not all art is about portraying a realistic image, and that technical skills (like the ability to paint a scene that looks as though it may have been photographed) are not the only kind of artistic skills. Some art is meant to be pretty or look like something. Other art is meant to carry a message or an idea, to provoke thought.

Reinhart’s art is utterly genius.

“But anyone could have done that! It doesn’t take any special skill! I could have done that!”

Ok. Maybe you could have. But you didn’t.

Give abstract art some respect. It’s more important than you realize.

bleedingheartworks

hollowedskin

Concept and the audiences interpretation is just as important as technical ability in a lot of peices.

I remember this one time I went to the museum of modern art in Sydney with my mother and in the foyer was this enormous wall sized canvas made up of hundreds of squares of seemingly random colours. My mum always does the “you could do so much better I can’t beleive that got into a gallery” schtic and we walked past and looked at rhe rest of the gallery but that painting was on my mind.

It bothered me that I couldn’t see a pattern in the colours but each of them HAD to have a reason. It wouldn’t be in this gallery for nothing.

On the way out we read the artists commentary plaque and it said that the painting was a mental health journal. every day three times a day the artist painted a square in a colour corresponding to how he felt. Read top to bottom left to right it cataloged his emotions for 6 months.

We stood back and saw the bright yellows and the soft pinks and saw how sometimes the calm blues faded into angry oranges and bright hot reds. And we saw how the further we looked along the less bright sunny colours were seen. How even the angry flaming colours turned to dark painful reds. The blues became more prominent and in the centre there was a vertical line. 9 panels entirely black

And we knew that for three days straight he had felt so entirely helpless that he couldn’t see any colour at all.

It was so painful to read this wall of colour knowing what it meant. Seeing someone’s descent into a depressive period like that. You walked across the room hoping to see the bright sunny yellows and leaf greens again. And after seeing those black panels you began to feel releif that something might have been even a lighter shade of grey. Because it wasn’t hopeless blackness.

Yeah. Anyone could have painted that. But they didn’t. And it didn’t make any sense until we bothered to find out why. And then it was raw and honest and had us in tears hoping that this artist wouldn’t ever have to paint a black square again.

I took a photo of the painting and the artists description so I would remember who he was. But a few years later I lost all my files in a hard drive crash and I haven’t ever been able to find that painting again. Even 10 years later I still remember it and I still want to know if he’s okay

yeah-yeah-beebiss-1

that snorlax .gif reminded me of one of my favorite animals ever, an elephant seal called Homer who went on a months-long rampage of car-humping destruction in a new zealand town

some highlights of homer’s odyssey:

causing tons of property damage by attempting to fuck cars, boat trailers, trees, and trash cans (did i mention that he weighed two tons)

he was apparently particularly attracted to red cars

at one point, the population of Gisborne attempted to contain him by putting barriers on the boat ramp he’d been using to get on land

his response was to wait for a swell to move the barriers, get back on shore, cross the road, and fuck a power box, cutting off the electricity to a local restaurant and the coast guard building (and presumably tasering his own dick in the process)

accidentally offset some of the property-damage costs by bringing in busloads of japanese tourists who were at the time visiting a city a few miles over

(there was one claim that he also squished a person who got too close to him, but i can’t find anything backing this up)

he was later revealed to have been the same elephant seal who had previously terrorized the town of Christchurch, hundreds of miles away

in Christchurch, he was recorded climbing a two-meter wall, breaking into a mall, and humping more cars and trash cans

(this isn’t even the first time something like this has happened, as an elephant seal in Coromandel became a local celebrity in the 80s after coming ashore and trying to fuck cows; Humphrey was later immortalized with a fiberglass statue)

Gisborne’s local radio station created a (now-defunct) website for him called “Homer’s Home,” complete with a forum for people to track his amorous adventures and a page where kids could send him emails of support

just look at him