Dada

Dada didn't begin in a gallery; it began in a cabaret in neutral Zurich in 1916. While Europe tore itself apart in the trenches, a group of exiles including Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara concluded that if "logic" and "reason" had led to such industrial-scale murder, then logic and reason were the enemies. They embraced the irrational, the chaotic, and the nonsensical as the only honest response to a world gone mad.

The movement was defined more by what it hated than what it loved. It was "anti-art" in the sense that it rejected the traditional aesthetics of the bourgeoisie—the very people who were funding the war. To the Dadaists, a beautiful painting was a lie that masked a hideous reality. By performing "sound poems" that were mere gibberish or screaming at their audiences, they sought to shatter the cultural complacency of the era.

Dadaists pioneered the idea that the artist’s hand was less important than the artist’s choice. This peaked with Marcel Duchamp’s "readymades"—found objects like a bicycle wheel or a porcelain urinal (Fountain) that were declared art simply because he chose them. This was a radical pivot: art was no longer about technical mastery of oil paint or marble; it was a conceptual act of provocation.

The movement turned the debris of modern life into its medium. Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann invented photomontage, cutting up magazines and newspapers to create jarring, satirical critiques of government and gender roles. By using "non-art" materials—glue, trash, mass-produced photos, and noise—they democratized creation while simultaneously mocking the idea of the "masterpiece."

While the Zurich group focused on performance and "primitivism," the Berlin Dadaists were far more militant. Living in the collapse of the German Empire, artists like George Grosz and John Heartfield used art as a weapon against the rising tide of nationalism and the military-industrial complex. Their work was jagged, angry, and explicitly designed to incite social change.

Across the Atlantic, New York Dada was less political and more ironic. Centered around Duchamp and Francis Picabia, it focused on the absurdity of the machine age and the fluidity of identity. Meanwhile, in Paris, the movement became more literary and linguistic, eventually dissolving into internal squabbles that would birth a more structured successor: Surrealism.

By the early 1920s, Dada began to die of its own success. Once the movement started being featured in prestigious galleries and analyzed by serious critics, it lost its status as an outsider threat. Tristan Tzara famously remarked that "Dada is like a vitamin," meant to be absorbed and used up, not preserved in a museum. Many of its core members grew tired of pure negation and sought a more constructive way to explore the unconscious.

Though short-lived, its DNA is the foundation of almost all modern and contemporary art. Without Dada, there is no Pop Art, no Conceptualism, and no Punk Rock. It taught the world that art doesn't have to be beautiful, it doesn't have to be permanent, and it doesn't even have to be made by an "artist"—it just has to wake the viewer up.