Modern art is fun

January 17 2026

Modern art seems to be simultaneously accused of being too serious and not serious enough. It’s thought to only appeal to out-of-touch critics and art dealers and at the same time too ridiculous to share museum walls with the Greats of art history. The latter is funny because most modern art was made to provoke the same reaction a century ago -- you would imagine we would be tired of the scandal by now.

I think that modern art is fun. I think it’s worth our attention because it is playful. I realized this when my professor of modern art had me and two other students perform Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist poem, "l’admiral cherche une maison à louer." It requires three people to recite German, French, and English lines at the same time. It's entirely nonsensical, but I did it again for a free-choice recitation in a poetry class, because it’s fun. Of course, I won’t deny the poem’s background as a reaction to World War I and the Dadaist's anti-bourgeois motivations. but the poem does not require a contextual preface to understand that it’s rejecting any sort of self-seriousness that may be imposed on it.

What I hate to admit is that the Dada movement failed to break the tradition of meaning in art. It appears today that art must justify itself now more than ever. When the question is raised of its importance, people scramble to prove that art can in someway change the world; every writing contest in my university inbox prompts to describe the future or some sort of social change. We seem to have regressed from the modern artist’s revolution in form to a demand of something revolutionary in content, but this only conforms to traditional expectations of meaning.

The result of this are movies like Paul Thomas Andersen’s recent One Battle after Another. What is literally “revolution” in content has done nothing to mobilize the masses of people who’ve seen it. Instead, the movie has made a commodity out of revolution making millions in the box office. “The revolution is not a dinner party.”¹

If art must subvert something, it should be our productivity culture that demands a utilitarian purpose out of everything. All we work and all we learn becomes abstracted into a number of productive hours. Even our hobbies must be a productive use of our time that can be transformed into Letterboxd and Goodreads statistics. Make art that is a waste of time, that no one wants to buy or sell. Make art that is useless and make art that is meaningless; art that is fun.

--

1. if you think my “political art is not political” take is bad, see my “politicians are not political”