Many discussions/fights/strong lines of demarcation have come to be as a result of art movements. Dada is/was the most unruly of them all. Dada has its beginnings in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 and was a reaction to World War I. Today, nytimes has an article about an exhibition about Dada, which opens at the George Pompidou Center. The show
…proposes that Dada is still very much alive, its influence on contemporary art all too apparent in today’s collages, installations, ready-mades and performances.
And that,
…Dada was creative in its radical nihilism.
…Dada was principally an intellectual movement, one that set out to provoke and scandalize as a strategic response to prevailing social and artistic values.
But more importantly, Dada introduced a line of thinking that questionned authorship, authority, the object and favored appropriation. But overttime,
Dada’s aesthetic values may even have triumphed, but its political message has been forgotten. Today, many artists like to shock, not to overthrow the art establishment but to join it.
John Perreault’s defense of Mike Bidlo has been a refreshing reading about the legacy of Dada, the art market and one’s artistic ‘devil’-ish career.
Image from here.
