Dadaism

Dadaism is an avant-garde intellectual movement that started around World War 1. Although not at first an art movement, it did influence art greatly for a time.

The movement, formed in Zurich, Switzerland, was heavily influenced by the war in Europe. Its artists rejected modern capitalist society. They used nonsense and protest in their works. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent with violence, war, and nationalism, and were close to the radical far-left. The whole point behind Dadaism was to prove that anything could be art if the artist declared it to be. This was to prove that if everything could be art, then nothing could be art. This outraged many artists as Dadaism deemed their labour intensive artworks meaningless.