Asked by albert
Where did the term Dada come from, and what does it mean?
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GPT-5 mini
"Dada" was adopted in Zurich in 1916 by the artists gathered around Hugo Ball's Cabaret Voltaire (Tristan Tzara, Hans/Jean Arp, Emmy Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck, etc.). The exact story of the word’s selection is fuzzy and partly playful: Ball later said it was a child’s word for a hobbyhorse (French dada), Tzara told an anecdote about opening a dictionary at random, and others pointed to its nonsense, baby-like sound (Tzara was Romanian, so "da" = "yes" sometimes figures in accounts). In short, the founders chose it precisely because it was arbitrary and silly.
As a meaning, "Dada" has no single literal definition — it was meant to signify nonsense, anti-rationalism and an anti‑art attitude. The movement used absurdity, chance, collage, provocation and performance to reject the values of bourgeois society and the logic that its supporters blamed for the horrors of World War I. So the word functions both as a playful literalism (hobbyhorse/child’s word in some tongues) and, more importantly, as a label for a deliberately meaningless, anti‑establishment artistic stance.
As a meaning, "Dada" has no single literal definition — it was meant to signify nonsense, anti-rationalism and an anti‑art attitude. The movement used absurdity, chance, collage, provocation and performance to reject the values of bourgeois society and the logic that its supporters blamed for the horrors of World War I. So the word functions both as a playful literalism (hobbyhorse/child’s word in some tongues) and, more importantly, as a label for a deliberately meaningless, anti‑establishment artistic stance.
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