Dada-companion.com Website Review

has shaken society's notions of art and cultural production. Fiercely anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical, Dada questioned the myth of originality, of the artist as genius suggesting instead that everybody should be an artist and that almost anything could be art. Surrealism, Constructivism, Lettrism, Situationism, Fluxus, Pop and OpArt, Conceptual Art and Minimalism: most twentieth-century art movements after 1923 have roots to Dada. Dada works still have a radicality and freshness that attracts today's culture jammers and disrupters of life Emerging during the crisis period of the First world war, Dada's strategies of critiquing the dominant culture have been used by radical groups ever since. The Dada Cabaret was re-enacted by young German and Austrian writers and artists immediately after the Second World War, and Dada slogans were painted on buildings in Paris during the protests of 1968. Greil Marcus traces the connections between Dada, the Situationists and the Se* Pistols, suggesting that Dada was a model of revolt for these later movements. He quotes Henri Lefebvre, a close friend of the Situationists, who wrote: To the degree that modernity has a meaning, it is this: it carries within itself, from Dada artists and writers were among the first to intervene in mas* media; indeed interventions made up much of their activity. They cut out reproductions of photographs in the daily press and critically recontextualized them. Walter Benjamin recognized the importance of Dada when he wrote in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' that when authenticity ceases to be an important part of making art, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual it begins to be based on another practice, politics. Dada photomonteurs rearranged the cultural and political myths propagated by the press. The Berlin Dadas even presented themselves as an advertising agency; they exploited the desire for sensationalism by feeding the mas* media improbable and ridicu*ous stories.