Young At Heart: Dada at MOMA

The New Yorker... Young At Heart: Dada at MOMA by Peter Schjeldahl. "...What was Dada? What it still is: a word - 'hobbyhorse,' in French. Baby talk. Supposedly plucked at random from a dictionary by a coterie of war-evading young writers and artists in Zurich in 1916, 'dada' was a two-syllable nonsense poem and a craftily meaningless slogan, signalling a rejection of grownup seriousness at a time when grownups by the million were shooting one another to pieces on the Western Front for reasons that rang ever more hollow. Reason itself was made the scapegoat. 'Let us try for once not to be right,' the group's most influential founder, the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, urged in a quieter passage of one of his careening manifestos. Dada spread like a chain letter among disaffected bohemians after the war. Wired to self-destruct - 'The true Dadas are against Dada,' Tzara enjoined - it was over by 1924, succeeded by imperatives, like those of Surrealism and Constructivism, to be revolutionary in more focussed, even grownup, ways."