“Dadaism has launched an attack on the fine arts. It has declared art to be a magic opening of the bowels, administered an enema to the Venus of Milo, and finally enabled 'Laocoon and Sons' to ease themselves after a thousand-year struggle with the rattlesnake. Dadaism has reduced positive and negative to utter nonsense. It has been destructive in order to achieve indifference.”

—  Hans Arp

1910-20s
Source: Isms in Art, (Hans Arp and El Lissitzky, The isms of art, 1924), published in 1925

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Dadaism has launched an attack on the fine arts. It has declared art to be a magic opening of the bowels, administered …" by Hans Arp?
Hans Arp photo
Hans Arp 42
Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist 1886–1966

Related quotes

Frédéric Chopin photo

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) Polish composer

As quoted in If Not God, Then What?
Source: If Not God, Then What? (2007) by Joshua Fost, p. 93

John F. Kennedy photo

“Today no war has been declared — and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, Address to ANPA
Context: Today no war has been declared — and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired.
If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.
It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions — by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence — on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.
Nevertheless, every democracy recognizes the necessary restraints of national security — and the question remains whether those restraints need to be more strictly observed if we are to oppose this kind of attack as well as outright invasion.

Ravi Zacharias photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
Thomas Mann photo

“Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.”

Speech at the US Library of Congress (29 May 1945); published as "Germany and the Germans" ["Deutschland und die Deutschen"] in Die Neue Rundschau [Stockholm] (October 1945), p. 58, as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter

Andrei Tarkovsky photo
Georges Bataille photo

“It is the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxvii

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien photo

“The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.”

On Fairy-Stories (1939)
Context: The story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi photo

“The negative efforts that had been done for the past three years that aims to toppling the state, by virtue of Allah and yours, has achieved nothing. and it won't.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by el-Sisi during a cultural symposium organized by MOD Department of Moral Affairs on 11 January 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w50oWry07E.
2014

Susan Sontag photo

Related topics