Birds aren't real

 

Peter McIndoe, the 23-year-old creator of the Birds Aren't Real movement, with his van in Fayetteville, Ark.Credit...Rana Young for The New York Times

When reading this blurb, your's truly keeps thinking about the nooze or better yet, Dada as Marcel Duchamp, and significant others thumbed their nose at the world with funny and insightful art for the ages. Think Camus about absurdity or Moliere about hypocrisy and one sees why McIndoe, and others, have something significant to say about misinformation writ large in the age of the net.

Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1920–21

Dada artists, group photograph, 1920, Paris. From left to right, Back row: Louis Aragon, Theodore Fraenkel, Paul Eluard, Clément Pansaers, Emmanuel Fay (cut off). Second row: Paul Dermée, Philippe Soupault, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. Front row: Tristan Tzara (with monocle), Celine Arnauld, Francis Picabia, André Breton

Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, the inaugural exhibition by the Society to be staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York.

What Birds Aren’t Real truly is, they say, is a parody social movement with a purpose. In a post-truth world dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have coalesced around the effort to thumb their nose at, fight and poke fun at misinformation. It’s Gen Z’s attempt to upend the rabbit hole with absurdism.

Duchamp would get Birds aren't real in a nanosecond. :)