Dada Stuff

This reading was somewhat interesting for me, having already studied the visual aspects of the Dada movement. But when we went over Dada in my modern art class my teacher more or less summed up the movement as, 'The Dadaists said that anything can be art so they got away with a ton of crap,' -- so I didn't really get the whole anti-war aspect.

At the same time, though, they still strike me as being like the futurists -- it seems juvenile to me how they believed they could permanently destroy art as we know it by rejecting traditional art, culture and aesthetics. I get where they were coming from about tradition > reason & logic of the bourgeois > war, "conformity" and whatnot. And maybe, had I lived in that time period, I'd feel the same way about artists and the art institutions that were paving the way for everyone else. I don't know, though, they seemed like pretty cool dudes to me.

I also noticed a lot of parallels to the futurist movement, even though they had very opposing views of war.

"...Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets... Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity..."