Word: dada
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...What Dada did was to release art from the burden of its exclusive past in order to find it everywhere--thought was relative, logic false, final truth non-existent, morality but a plague produced by the intelligence, art meaningless. Duchamp's bottle rack read "art is junk" and his urinal "art is a trick." Nothing was real or true except the individual pursuing his whim, the artist bestriding his Dada. Dada overturned any object, mocked it and displaced it as an experiment in apprehending it. Yet beneath the Dadaist irony lay a desperate protest. Dada was an act of rebellion...
...Dada wrought irrevocable change, a change that means all the difference for its latter day 'cousins.' Its nihilistic underside simply made impossible the trust in an objective basis for criticism. Nobody could with any certainty label art good or bad, much less differentiate between art and non-art. The confidence in having critical bearings at all was cruelly undermined...
...contemporary critical scene has yet to absorb such a blow. While Dada was a shameless exposure of all that has been considered "holy in art," it was propelled by a laughter going so deep that a topsy-turvy admiration set in. This admiration clapped for the funeral of the "holy in art" and substituted a new formula holiness--founded in' a 'mix of playfulness, curiosity, and contradiction. And so is bred the Dadaist caricatuue of the seventies...
...same stroke he sought to administer a purgative to a society riddled with lies for which he found a shameful counterpart in the Mona Lisa with a moustache. He generated an atmosphere of uncertainty intended to liberate the relevance of art. What has grown in the gap left by Dada's failed promise is not only the staunchness of the New Conservatives but also a dangerously pre-emptive sort of subjectivism in contemporary criticism. Here, the critic assumes that his job is to smell out the con. So what he likes he deems "real art," what he doesn...
Cage's point is so logically descended from Dada, but it has been lost upon his public. However serious the aims of Cage and his colleagues (the Pop artists of the sixties, Happenings and Environmentalists) they were ignored as their art was readily assimilated by the public because of its novelty, because the new has come to mean the good...