Dadaism Quotes

“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
― Marcel Duchamp

“I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way."

- Tristan Tzara "Dada Manifesto 1918”
― Tristan Tzara

“Dada is like your hopes: nothing
like your paradise: nothing
like your idols: nothing
like your heroes: nothing
like your artists: nothing
like your religions: nothing”
― Francis Picabia

“Thought is made in the mouth.”
― Tristan Tzara

“Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch?”
― Hugo Ball

“we live 24 minutes too late and that is viewed from the right side”
― Kurt Schwitters

“For me taking part in the decay of present-day man is an entertaining task and the only one that interests me.”
― Tristan Tzara

“Words don't get lost in translation, they get remixed. Just watch what happens to this quote.”
― Stewart Stafford

“This fetishistic transmutation separates Warhol from Duchamp and all his predecessors. For Duchamp, Dada, the Surrealists and all who worked to deconstruct representation and smash the work of art are still part of an avant-garde, and belong, in one way or another, to the critical utopia. For us moderns, at any rate, art has ceased to be an illusion; it has become an idea. It is no longer idolatric now, but critical and utopian, even when -- particularly when -- it demystifies its object or when, with Duchamp, it aestheticizes at a stroke, with its bottle-rack, the whole field of daily reality.

This is still true of a whole segment of Pop Art, with its lyrical vision of popcorn or comic strips. Banality here becomes the criterion of aesthetic salvation, the means of exalting the creative subjectivity of the artist. Obliterating the object the better to mark out the ideal space of art and the ideal position of the subject. But Warhol belongs to no avant-garde and to no utopia. And if he settles utopia's hash, he does so because, instead of projecting it elsewhere, he takes up residence directly at its heart, that is, at the heart of nowhere. He is himself this no place: this is how he traverses the space of the avant-garde and, at a stroke, completes the cycle of the aesthetic. This is how he at last liberates us from art and its critical utopia.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

“How do you make the morning come?
The morning will come by itself
How and where will it come?
It will wash its face, then come out
Is that tomorrow?
That is tomorrow morning
Now the crickets are singing, aren't they?
And the Bugle is sounding the last post, isn't it?
Trains are still running
It's not the witching hour yet, is it?”
― Nakahara Chuya, The Poems of Nakahara Chuya

“Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.”
― Tristan Tzara

“Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you.”
― Tristan Tzara

“Oh, this century of glowing light and barbed wire, primordial strength and abyss!”
― Hugo Ball, Ball and Hammer: Hugo Ball's Tenderenda the Fantast

“Wos wehtut, tuts am wehsten.”
― Herbert Achternbusch, Mixwix

“This is Zürich for me: The old town that reeks of Dada, James Joyce and Cabaret Voltaire.”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)

“If as an artist, you’re ever sure about your skills at any given moment, you’re either doing the wrong thing… or you’re doing the thing wrong”
― Lynn Cole

“History has this way of not getting the joke.”
― Lynn Cole

“The tables are moved by spirit - paintings and other works of art are are locked away. And the soul inside becomes ever more inspired as the auction price goes up!”
― Francis Picabia

“All in all, my dearest: art was a teething problem.”
― Walter Serner, Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist & Those Aspiring to Become One