Did the Surrealists try too hard?

Id think it was poor form to own an anteater. Dali was waay ove the top as a human being. He even initiated his own "fake art for fun and profit" by signing a thousand or more of blank sheets of print paper which were then printed with just junk and sold for huge profits.

Dali became his own means of self destruction. ALthough I really love his art.

Unexpected, unreal, provocative . . . pure Dali.

But, wonder why PETA wasn't there.

When you consider the influence of the Dadists, can you say the Surrealists really tried that hard at all? I mean in the sense of breaking new ground. I admit I haven't read enough to articulate, off the top of my head, the substantive difference between the two movements. Maybe someone smart will come along and explain (that should be my new sigline).

I would also ask that person, however, whether the Surrealists had it harder than the Dadaists, who at least had a fairly sturdy nemesis, WWI, to build a movement around. As nonsensical as their art was, it had all the historical relevance in the world. Whereas the most frustrated artists are those content with the world around them.

So do you think the movement was really about art, society, or simply look at me-ism?

I dont know the big artificial bifurcation between Dada and Surrealism. One was anti art at its origin at the end of WWI and only involved art as they ran out of other **** to parody. Surrealism was always about hyper sympbolism but most of the Dada guys were living big as surrealists(if they were good draftsmen)

Don't get me wrong I love the art, But I love Alice Cooper as Well. I like to think art is about passion and not recognition or money, but I know for a good part I am wrong.

it would have been more surreal if he'd been able to convince people he had an anteater as a pet without having an actual anteater

I always thought that Dada was just a moving party of drunks like Piccabia and Duchamp

At least nominally Dadaists had an agenda aside from shock and perception twisting. Does Art need more than sensuality to be meaningful?

TRy that so I can understand your point?
If I may digress by a graphic of that point

If Dada meant A

Does art not need only C?

I guess Im not on board here.

the surrealism B was implied.

Dadists had a political agenda or at least an ideological agenda outside of the art itself. The surrealist did not seem to have an agenda aside from aggrandizment of self and perception shock, which would make them seem superficially sensual. Does art need more than the sensual to be real? Sort of a rhetorical question as, Dali et. al. are celebrated artists who are part of a defined tradition in art history.

Most of the French surrealists were solidly on the Left and made a lot of noise in the 1920s and 30s against the "union sacrée" of Left and Right following the war. In 1931, following a French colonial exhibition, a number of surrealists (Breton, Éluard, Soupault, etc.) staged a phony mock exhibition protesting what they saw as gratuitous displays of French militarism. So the agenda was certainly there, though we could probably debate the extent to which the agenda was reflected in actual artworks. But Breton and his cohort certainly considered themselves to be politically engaged.

More than one art historian has also suggested that French surrealism was an attempt to create a distinctly French avant-garde scene in Paris, which before the war had been dominated by styles pioneered by foreigners (Picasso, Mondrian, Severini, etc.).

Disregarding the historical roots of Surrealism (Breton, et al) because I'm concerned about the mental state of contemporary Surrealists as they work, I distinguish between two sorts. The first, those who attempt to create caricatures of dreams (e.g., Dali, Tanjuy, Ernst) while fully awake and those (e.g., the automatic painters--Wilfredo Lam, Joan Miro, Roberto Matta and Gorky )who express the character of their own dreaming by painting from their own unconscious . The former tend to focus on dreams and their typical content, and the latter on unconscious processes that gauge the depth of the mind.

Ugh.
Stupid, self-centred man!
Poor animal!
Why couldn't he have just stuck to his usual (pretty harmless) publicity-seeking activities & left this innocent creature out of it?