The Art of Absurdity: Resurgence of Dadaism through Gen-Z memes.

Digital natives today are being flooded by unnatural amounts of information and content at a rate and quality that has never been seen before. You can find content and information on the nichest of subjects, particularly visual content, and our ability to understand and decode images has increased manifold. In this sea of visual content, memes, particularly Gen-Z memes, occupy a special trench of their own.

Gen-Z memes are infamous for seeming like they have little to no meaning, and look terrible. Unlike most memes, they don’t attempt to be directly funny, and the images and texts often have no connection to each other. All in all, absurd. These characteristics might sound similar to those of dada artwork, from the Dadaist Movement of the early 20th century. Read on as Sakshi Sadashiv explores the cultural and contextual elements that led to each movement, and draw interesting parallels between the two.