What is Dada?

Dada, early 20th-century art movement, whose members sought to ridicule the culture of their time through deliberately absurd performances, poetry, and visual art. Dadaists embraced the extraordinary, the irrational, and the contradictory largely in reaction to the unprecedented and incomprehensible brutality of World War I (1914-1918). Their work was driven in part by a belief that deep-seated European values —nationalism, militarism, and even the long tradition of rational philosophy —were implicated in the horrors of the war. Dada is often described as nihilistic —that is, rejecting all moral values; however, dadaists considered their movement an affirmation of life in the face of death.

By the end of 1922 the dada movement had begun to fall apart. Quarrels developed between some members, and others seemed to tire of maintaining a stance of outrage against society. In Paris the dadaists were joined by a group of writers, including Frenchmen Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and Philippe Soupault, who transformed dadaist interests in irrationality and chance into a new movement known as surrealism. Dada's influence was also felt in a number of later movements. They include a group of 1960's performance artists known as Fluxus; the pop art movement, which incorporated images from popular culture; and the conceptual art movement, which viewed ideas in themselves as art.

Source: Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2003∞
See also: Wikipedia Dadaism∞, MSN Learning and Research: Dada∞

CategoryArt