Dada emerged around 1917 as a contrarian impulse against conventional attitudes and practices in the European art market at the outbreak of World War I. Traditional niceties such as symmetry and appealing subject matter became absurd against the horrifying backdrop of trench warfare and mustard gas. So founding members of the Dada movement - such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst and Man Ray - vowed to turn the tables on society and on art itself, by deploying irreverent and destructive new forms of theater, poetry, painting, music and sculpture. Initially convening at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, this group of anti-artists espoused nonsense, random cut-ups and collage, found art, and anti-bourgeois tirades against capitalism as means to undermine the stuffy, stilted, ineffectual world of fine arts. But rather than destroying art, they expanded its purview and led directly to surrealism, abstract art, musique concrète, pop art, and the theatre of the absurd - to name just a few of Dada's progeny.
Wikipedia article: Dada
