I’m going to assume you want at least one direct, serious answer.
If you really want to “speak dada”, you’ve got to embrace both absurdity as well as anti-establishment thinking. Because that’s the root of dada. The movement started as a rejection of the norms of the era, and spread into art, literature, and other forms of expression after that.
I tend to look at it as something that has lost its relevance due to having become part of western culture so effectively that the expression of dadaism is almost as bourgeois as the things it originally stood against. Hell, meme culture is a perfect example of that, in its earliest forms.
Anyway, that’s the key: absurdity and upending norms.
What is its relationship with or to what extent could it be characterized as “authentic” as opposed to eccentric contrarianism?
Honestly?
The only way you can tell the difference is inside the self. The art can never be certain as contrarian or authentic dada.
Things like performance art, or the philosophy itself, the only thing that determines authenticity is the intent of the individual, and you can’t tell that from the outside with complete authority. You can’t even exclude what seems like contrarian expression because there’s a degree of that inherent to dada. While the point of dada isn’t to be contrary, you kinda have to be contrary sometimes in order to reject old paradigms via the absurd.
Lube and a good, firm grip.
Learn the timbre of duende.
Embrace the numinous.
Frambule your own ossentulle.
