What is Dada Anyway?

Neatorama reader Greg Fiorini self-nominated his blog Hemingray9, which is all about Dada.

I only have a vague inkling of Dadaism, so, I looked it up on wikipedia:

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 were 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 order and the carnage they believed it wreaked. Through this rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.

And on the actual name "Dada":

The origin of the name Dada is unclear. Some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that 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 with a paper knife, 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.

It has also been suggested that the word "dada" was chosen randomly from the Larousse dictionary.

I think now I understand Dada less than before. Which is probably the whole point of it.

The above is Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., which mocks the Mona Lisa.

Dada [wiki] | Greg's website: Link (complete with a patron saint!) - Thanks Greg!


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dada is what we call in english, well UK english, dandling.

It is when you bounce a little kid on your foot.

You cross one leg over the other, providing a sprung foot ,as it were,as a saddle, hold the kids hands and bounce them up and down.

Dandling, or in France faire le dada.
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Precision: at the bottom of the print are the letters LHOOQ; read in french,the letters sound like the sentence "elle a chaud au cul", literally meaning "her ass is hot", colloquially meaning "she is horny", in french slang.
That is dada, too.
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I'm a huge Dada fan.

Here's my contributions to the art:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wflbq6Q8sdI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFfhAGEtr5o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3HKUMfs5FE
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