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DADA (DAH-duh)
Art
movement based on irrationality and irreverence
Common
clue: Arp art; Anti-art art movement; Man Ray's genre; Art of the
absurd; Baby's favorite art movement?
Crossword
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Crude
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Video:
The
ABCs of Dada
Dada,
or Dadaism, was a cultural movement that involved visual arts,
literature (mainly poetry), theatre, and graphic design, and
began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland during World War I.
Dada
activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and
publication of art/literary journals. Passionate coverage of art,
politics and culture filled their publications.
Fountain
by
Marcel Duchamp. 1917
Deliberate
irrationality, the rejection of the prevailing standards in art,
disillusionment, cynicism, nonsense, chance and randomness
characterize Dada. The movement was a protest against the
barbarism of World War I, the bourgeois interests Dada adherents
believed inspired the war, and what they believed was an
oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday
society. The movement influenced later styles, movements and
groups including surrealism and Fluxus.
According
to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was anti-art.
For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the
opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored
aesthetics. If art was to have at least an implicit or latent
message, Dada strove to have no meaning — interpretation of
Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to
sensibilities, Dada is to offend. It is perhaps then ironic that
Dada became an influential movement in modern art. Dada became a
commentary on art and the world, thus became art itself.
The
origin of the name Dada
is unclear. Some
believe that it is a nonsensical word. Some believe it originates
from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco's
frequent use of the words da,
da,
meaning yes,
yes in
the Romanian language. Others believe that a group of artists
assembled in Zürich in 1916, wanting a name for their new
movement, chose it at random by stabbing a French-German
dictionary, and picking the name that the point landed upon. Dada
in French is a
child's word for hobby-horse.
In French the colloquialism, c'est
mon dada,
means it's
my hobby.
According
to the Dada ideal, the movement would not be called Dadaism,
much less designated an art
movement.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Dada".
95
Tokyo immigrant to the U.S.
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