UislQlsrhI- A "Dada" title

I have no problem with imagination.  Exploring the dream world, well that's okay too.  However, I'm not quite sure what to make of this Dada movement.  It started out as some people protesting World War I; a political movement turned artistic.  However, the art that was created was supposedly a "product of chance."  The artists' theory was that the world didn't make any sense, had in fact gone "mad," so why should the art be any different?  Two things came out of this movement: genius and insanity.  That's just my opinion, but I'll use a few examples to demonstrate my position.

First of all, this poem.  Go ahead, and see if you can make anything of it.

The Great Lament of My Obscurity Three
where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire and the plumes encircle the brightness in the distant sulphur morning the cows lick the salt lilies 
my son
my son
let us always shuffle through the colour of the world
which looks bluer than the subway and astronomy
we are too thin
we have no mouth
our legs are stiff and knock together
our faces are formeless like the stars
crystal points without strength burned basilica
mad : the zigzags crack
telephone
bite the rigging liquefy
the arc
climb
astral
memory
towards the north through its double fruit
like raw flesh
hunger fire blood 

Tristan Tzara


Okay, so what do you think?  Such a lovely portrayal of...what exactly?  To me this poem isn't art so much as  a statement.  It says, "I don't care what this means, it's just words on a page.  Dada."  To me, putting words on a page that don't say anything at all really doesn't constitute art, it just tells me that this guy was frustrated with life and was venting onto a piece of paper.  This is one of the things I would call insanity.  (That word seems harsh to me at the moment, but at the same time, I can't really think of another one to use.)


Second, these artworks, the two on the left by Jean Arp and the one on the right by Hannah Hoch. 

These works are cool.  Not only are they pleasing to the eye, but the artists used materials that were fresh to the artistic scene.  Even though Arp's works may not have been planned out or may not represent true to life objects, they are still eye catching.  Hoch's collage is incredibly well orchestrated.  At first glance, you may not notice any specific objects, but look more closely and you can see that the women's heads make up the head of a man.  This art of collage is one of those things that caught on, probably because chaos somehow looks really cool with all of the colors and shapes.  I find that these don't seem nearly as fluke as the poem above, which makes me give more credit to these works of art versus the word "slop" of Tzara.  

Third is this...urinal.  You tell me if you think it is art

The story behind this piece is that Marcel Duchamp, who named this Fountain and submitted it for an exhibition, literally found it and put a fake name on it.  To me, this man was laughing at art.  I feel like he was only trying to say, "I can do whatever I want to and you can't do anything about it."  I wonder if he really thought it was art himself, or if he was just being cynical.  This piece is remembered because it made people question what art really is: Something beautiful or an idea created by the artist.  This is another example of insanity.  Marcel Duchamp had some other "ideas" too, that I would tend to mark as genius.  He was the one to create the mobile, which is something that is still widely used today.  But perhaps, this is another one of those things that takes effort to create, which is why it seems more like art to me.  

So, does effort equal art?  Is there a scale on which more effort equals better art?  I don't necessarily think so, because it doesn't seem like the piece with squares would be very difficult to create, although I'm not really sure.  But I do think that art can't come out of thin air just because an artist puts a name on it or throws words onto a page.  But that's just my opinion.  What do you think?

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