"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