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== The Arts Academy at  Benjamin Rush             ==

 **MEDIA ARTS CLASS**
**--** ** ART MOVEMENT : D//a//Da ** **--**  

Dada is absurd. Dada is unpredictable. Dada is random. Dada is anarchy. Dada is Anti-Art

As the artists themselves proclaimed, "**Dada means nothing **."
 * Dada** is a child's word for "**hobbyhorse **" in French; " <span style="color: rgb(14, 129, 104);">**yes, yes** " in Romanian; and " <span style="color: rgb(26, 89, 162);">**there, there**  " in German, and the brand name of a popular soap and hair tonic at the time (1916).

<span class="wiki_link_ext">Like the edgiest rock and hip-hop, Dada was young, smart, crude, angry, and outrageous. Dadaists, an interna- tional hodgepodge of mostly twenty-something artists and writers, were dismayed by the stupidity and horror of World War I. The conflict was unprecedented in human history because of its scale and its terrifying new weaponry. On average almost 900 Frenchmen and 1,300 Germans died every day between the outbreak of war in August 1914 and the armistice that ended it in November 1918. All told, nearly ten million people were killed.

For the dadaists, World War I discredited the notion of a civilized European society. As dadaist Hugo Ball noted, <span style="color: rgb(0, 88, 255);"> **the war proved that “this world of systems has gone to pieces.”** For Ball and his contemporaries, the pillars of society—law, culture, faith, language, economy, educa- tion, and the roles assigned to men and women—had failed to prevent the war and its unparalleled destruction.

Dada disowned the idea of the “masterpiece”—a great, singular oil painting, like the Mona Lisa, made by a skilled genius. Dadaists found oil painting pretentious, and they ridiculed art history’s elite, from Leonardo da Vinci to Paul Cézanne [fig. 4]. Against the backdrop of the war, dadaists found this entire tradition of art pompous and bankrupt.
 * DADA AND THE <span style="color: rgb(205, 19, 19);">ANTI -MASTERPIECE**

Go to the **[|CLASS BLOG]** for an assignment. Click to download more info: ( [|dada_student_guide.pdf] )

**__Dada Artists__:** <span class="wiki_link_ext">Otto Dix <span class="wiki_link_ext">[|Hans (Jean) Arp] <span class="wiki_link_ext"> [|Marcel Duchamp] <span class="wiki_link_ext">[|Christian Schad] <span class="wiki_link_ext"> [|George Grosz] <span class="wiki_link_ext">Hannah Hoch <span class="wiki_link_ext">Francis Picabia <span class="wiki_link_ext">Man Ray <span class="wiki_link_ext">Kurt Schwitters <span class="wiki_link_ext">Philippe Soupault <span class="wiki_link_ext">Joseph Stella