New art vs. new books

During a conversation today with magoo and thenewblack, we touched upon the ever-popular theme of materiality in texts. Something magoo said reminded me of the Dada movement. I'm still a little unclear as to what exactly Dada is, but from what I've heard here and there, Dada can be pretty much any form of art that is also "anti-art," manifested through literature, music, art, etc. Back in high school, I had a poetry assignment in one of my English classes in which my teacher asked us to create a poem using random words cut out from magazines and newspaper clippings; he said this was a form of dada-ism. I think the point was to break our conventional idea of what a poem should be, and to be aware that there's more than one, fixed creative process.

I see a lot of similarities between this "anti-art" and hypertext. I feel like the piecing together of a non-sequential story is also a form of dada-ism in both its intent and form. Well, as far as intent, dada apparently needs a political aspect in order to be dada...but even though hypertext doesn't have that inherently political quality, I think its deeper intent--to introduce us to a new, almost "anti" form of literature--qualifies it. So, can we call hypertext "anti-book" or "non-book"? I think a lot of us equate "anti-book" as "anti-literature" and thus the resistance that so many people have voiced thus far.

Something magoo said also made me think about success and new forms of art. I feel like modern or post-modern art has been relatively successful, and even if not universally liked, most people still know what it is. What about hypertext, the literary equivalent? This stuff's been around for over 20 years, but I first heard about it approximately a month ago, at the start of this semester. And it's only because I'm taking this class; I'm sure I would've gone on ignorantly for many years without ever encountering this if it hadn't been introduced to me by a class specifically on it. I can partially attribute this public non-knowledge of hypertext to the fact that a computer is needed in order to access the texts, but even so, the success isn't at all comparable to that of modern art. So far, I'm still getting used to hypertext and I'm not in love with it, but I feel like if modern artists received all this recognition for painting all this stuff with dots and lines and splashes (apologies to all modern artists out there), then hypertext is just as deserving, if not more.