Three Essential Dadaist Films: Groundbreaking Works by Hans Richter, Man Ray & Marcel Duchamp — openculture.com

Iconoclastic art movements need manifestos—to explain themselves, perhaps, to announce themselves, surely, but also, perhaps, to soften the blow of the work that is to come. In the case of Dadaism, the manifesto issued by Tristan Tzara in 1918 presents us with a curious paradox. Tzara expounds at length in several thousand words on the idea that “DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING.” In so doing, he tells us quite a bit about what Dada is, and what it is not. It is decidedly not, he writes, unified by any formal theory: “We have enough cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas.” It is no friend to the artistic establishment: “Is the aim of art to make money and cajole the nice nice bourgeois?” It is certainly not “art for art’s sake”: “A work of art should not be beauty in itself, for beauty is dead.”

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