"Dada is American, Dada is Russian, Dada is Spanish, Dada is Swiss, Dada is German, Dada is French, Belgian, Norwegian, Swedish, Monégasque."

(The titular quote is culled from Walter Conrad Arensberg's Dada is American.)

As Arensberg noted, Dada was a global affair. Whereas most other artistic movements both before and since such as Impressionism, Expressionism, and Pop Art, have been primarily confined to a specific geographic/cultural environment (Paris, France; Vienna, Austria; and New York City, United States, respectively), Dada was able transcend both geographical and cultural barriers by establishing Dada havens in six major cities in four different nations (in chronological order: Zurich, Switzerland; Berlin, Germany; Hannover, Germany; Cologne, Germany; New York City, United States; and Paris, France) in the span of four years (1916-1920). There are a number of reasons why Dada had a broader cultural than most movements.

To begin with, as mentioned in an earlier post, Dada possessed a great deal of conceptual plasticity. Popular Dada forms included: architecture, avant-garde poetry, collage, film, manifesto, novel, painting, performance art, photography, readymade, sculpture, short fiction, theatre, etc. Thus, if one subscribed to a distaste of popular art, war, consumerism, or any number of other criteria, their chosen medium was more than welcome in Dada.

Moreover, Dada was among the first movements (if not the very first) to use the notion of networking. Advances in modern technology made this possible to some extent in the sense that transportation become less of a luxury in the twentieth century, but the major networking tool utilized by the Dadaists dated back to the Renaissance: the printed word. Dada movements in each of the six aforementioned cities communicated and coordinated with one another through Dada reviews, small literary magazines that also galvanized the other major Twentieth Century global movement, Modernism. That literary reviews have become all but obsolete outside of the academic community is indicative of the intellectual laziness that plagues Americans in today's culture. While some Americans have clung to the notion that it is important to keep abreast of news items from outside the U.S. (if only to preserve their own interests), it has become anathema to Americans that culture exists anywhere in the world, since it clearly does not here at home.

Why is all of this relevant? It is relevant because in today's world, we are lucky if there is a single functional artistic movement in our society, let alone one that connects us with the rest of the world. Given our political isolationism and our geographic estrangement from the rest of the world, art continues to possess the unique potential to serve as a sort of universal language, something that can transcend political, geographical, religious, or cultural differences between the world's societies.
-Richard P. Chandler

"Dada has doubts about everything."

(The titular quote is culled from Georges Ribemonet-Dessaignes' Artichokes.)

The spirit of Dada was a very critical, perhaps even cynical, one. This spirit is necessary again today. The Dadaists reacted against what they perceived to be the trivial worthlessness of consumerism and advertising and the propaganda of newspapers and institutions. Dada's position on consumerism is never more clear than in Put Your Money in dada!, a mock-advertisement recruiting prospective Dadaists to set up accounts with the fictional "dada savings bank" where "every 100-mark note increases at a rate of 1,327 times a minute in accordance with the rules of cell division." This mock-advertisement was published in Der Dada 1 by the "Central Office of Dadaism," a fictional group whose name pejoratively recalls government bureaucracies.

Given the sycophantic relationship of the media towards the government in modern U.S. culture (e.g. the suppression by major media outlets of political dissidents such as Noam Chomsky through refusal to publish, vague and superficial reportage on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the apparent willingness on the part of the U.S. media (at least until public approval of the Bush administration began to wane recently) to take the White House at its word, etc.), a group that promotes thorough and critical examination of both of these bodies could go a long way to promote the idea of an informed electorate, something that is both vitally important and in short supply currently.

As regards consumerism, modern U.S. society is (in my estimation) unparalleled in its taste for utter decadence. By hijacking the malleable "American Dream" and equating it solely with affluence (and its resultant material gains), advertising has effectively replaced any ethical, spiritual, or intellectual impulses with the almighty profit margin. This national obsession with avarice has led the majority of the nation to readily swallow (or at the very least ignore) the morally bankrupt greed-driven ideas that shape our domestic and foreign policies (e.g. the reckless deregulation of the financial system that has led to the savings and loan, dot com, and real-estate crises; the national disgust for helping the less fortunate through social programs such as welfare, the aforementioned Iraq war which amounted to little more than an opportunistic cash-grab on the part of governmentally connected contractors, weapons producers, and the oil industry). Needless to say, a group devoted to social equity and pacifism that could convey the sheer absurdity of the prevailing conditions of modern U.S. society could only help. Moreover, this is precisely what the Dadaists did in response to World War I (a conflict similarly motivated by financial factors); that their success was mixed at best doesn't diminish that what they did was morally upright. They could face themselves without shame because they fought for humanity in the face of total depravity, and that is more than can be said for us.
-Richard P. Chandler