Tristan Tzara Explains Dada: Art, Anti-Art, & the Cut-Up Method

European aesthetic standards established by Burke and his predecessors began to be challenged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Artists like Picasso, Dali, and the Impressionists began to reject traditional realism and the established canons of beauty. This shift reflected broader cultural changes and the rise of modernism, which questioned whether universal aesthetic standards could exist at all.

Aesthetic standards and cultural hierarchies are historically contingent rather than timeless truths. In 19th-century France, academic art standards established specific rules for legitimate art, excluding everyday life and ordinary people from artistic subjects. The Frankfurt School demonstrates that cultural classifications once considered legitimate can become illegitimate over time, as shown by the transformation of Impressionism from 'common' to 'great' art. This historical contingency undermines claims that certain cultural forms are inherently superior to others.

The Royal Academy of Fine Arts controlled artistic life in mid-19th century Paris, establishing strict canons that artists must follow. The Paris Salon, held annually since the 15th century, was the primary pathway to professional success, with only about one-third of submissions accepted. Selection criteria included elevated allegorical subjects, technical mastery, and closed brushstrokes. By the mid-19th century, this system had become compromised by nepotism, secret agreements, and corruption. Charles Baudelaire's 1859 essay criticized academic art for repeatedly depicting Renaissance-era characters without genuine thought. The 19th century brought unprecedented change—three revolutions, wars, and rapid technological progress including steam engines, railways, and photography. This created a vacuum in academic art, which could not reflect the modern world. Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris (1850s-1870s) demolished approximately 20,000 buildings, replacing narrow medieval streets with wide boulevards. The opening of Japan in the late 1860s brought Japanese woodblock prints to Europe, which featured saturated colors, bold outlines, and absolute simplicity—radically different from Western traditions.

The Academy of Fine Arts controlled artistic taste and exhibition in the early 1800s, establishing strict standards for acceptable art. Academic works featured controlled studio lighting, idealized classical subjects, invisible brushwork, and centered compositions. Three major challenges emerged: Delacroix prioritized color over draftsmanship and depicted non-classical subjects like North African scenes; Courbet painted mundane scenes with unconventional color combinations; and the 1830 and 1848 revolutions fueled artistic rebellion. These artists sacrificed market opportunities for their principles, creating art that challenged institutional standards and expanded artistic expression beyond traditional boundaries.

PragerU argues that for centuries artists enriched Western society with works of astonishing beauty (The Night Watch, The Thinker, The Rocky Mountains), but something happened on the way to the 20th century when the profound, inspiring, and beautiful were replaced by the new, different, and ugly. They claim that the thousand-year ascent toward artistic perfection and excellence was pushed out beginning in the late 19th century when impressionists rebelled against classical standards, sowing seeds of aesthetic relativism where beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Manifestos in the 20th century served as powerful ideological tools that claimed exclusive truth and attacked opposing viewpoints. Unlike modern approaches that tolerate diversity, manifestos of this era were aggressive and uncompromising, presenting their claims as absolute truths without supporting evidence. Like the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, manifestos create conceptual foundations for political programs, even when their claims are false or ideological. The Futurist Manifesto exemplified this by celebrating war, violence, and destruction as artistic ideals, rejecting museums, libraries, and academic institutions. This demonstrates how artistic movements can align with destructive political ideologies, as the Futurist movement's embrace of war and fascism contributed to World War I and 20th-century political transformations.

Manifestos serve the social function of influencing public opinion and critiquing societal norms. Examples include the Poesia Manifesto for Brazil, the Anthropophagic Manifesto, and the Communist Party Manifesto. These texts were created by artists and intellectuals as tools for social critique and cultural change, establishing parameters for artistic and social transformation. Understanding manifestos helps students recognize how artistic movements articulate their vision and challenge existing cultural and social structures.

Art manifestos function as 'seismographs' revealing cultural tensions of their era, expressing 'thoughtful anger and a thoughtful wish to change something.' Despite confident proclamations, manifestos reveal underlying artist insecurity, which makes them appealing. The creative process involved researching feminist theory, discovering Valentina Sample's disturbing futurist manifestos about women, and transforming texts into performable dialects. Characters emerged naturally from text material (like stock market traders representing speed and technology) or through collaborative 'ping-pong' between creators. The goal was freeing manifestos from art historical context by performing them rather than reading them, having women speak testosterone-driven text, and getting the text as far away as possible from its original context. Translation research revealed significant distortions between original German Marxist texts and English versions, highlighting how translators exercise freedom with poetry and manifestos.

The speaker describes creating a manifesto as a way to synthesize their artistic and intellectual thoughts, explaining that it will be developed gradually piece by piece and will serve as the 'ponto final' (final point) alongside their album. They discuss the concept of artistic freedom and self-expression, describing how artists must be their own freedom rather than accepting external constraints. The speaker references the concept of 'Arte dos Pés' (Art of the Feet) and discusses how artists can 'escrever a cor da história' (write the color of history) through their creative work. This demonstrates how artists use written manifestos to articulate their creative philosophy and how artistic practice can serve as a form of cultural resistance and identity construction.

A manifesto in art is a public declaration that denounces an existing reality and proposes a new one, functioning as both a critique and an affirmation; it is characterized by its liminal nature (existing between individual and collective, real and utopian), its declarative structure (including a title, subject, pause, and call to action), and its purpose of transforming reality through artistic enunciation. Manifestos can be textual, performative, or embodied in works like paintings, songs, or actions, and they serve as the foundational documents for artistic movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Latin American vanguardism.

Modernism marked a fundamental crisis in representational art across all disciplines. In literature, depicting three-dimensional human figures in landscapes became uninteresting. In painting, creating pictures where viewers could mentally enter and where objects receded toward a vanishing point became uninteresting. In music, the traditional seven-tone diatonic scale became uninteresting, replaced by twelve-tone music that doesn't naturally resonate with the human soul. This crisis paralleled a scientific shift away from studying tangible phenomena toward exploring abstract concepts like galaxies and elementary particles. The modernist crisis reflects a broader transformation in human perception and artistic expression during the early 20th century.

Modernism emerged as an aesthetic response to modernity's uncertainty, beginning with first-wave modernism's Freudian turn inward toward radical subjectivity and the embrace of the ugly and irrational, as exemplified by Baudelaire's rejection of art depicting only beauty and Kafka's exploration of alienation in 'The Metamorphosis.' The second wave, or high modernism/avant-garde, fundamentally transformed art from representation to transformation, severing the connection between signifier and signified through linguistic structuralism (Saussure's signifier/signified model) and Russian formalism's concept of 'ostranenie' (defamiliarization), which makes art a hammer to create life rather than a mirror to reflect it. This radical shift, characterized by internationalism, youth cult, and rejection of bourgeois conventions, ultimately proved existentially unbearable, as the complete freedom from constraints left artists without ground to stand on, leading to tragic outcomes for figures like Mayakovsky.

Modern Art is defined as an art era from 1860 to 1970, with art eras being 100 years and movements being 10-20 years. Impressionism was the first movement, starting in 1859 when Edouard Manet submitted 'The Absent Drinker' to the Paris Salon, which rejected it for being unfinished and depicting an alcoholic. Despite rejection, the public supported him. Impressionism was centrist art, working within the system while introducing innovation. The Salon was ironically called the 'Salon of Rejects.' When rejected artists formed their own gallery, Impressionism emerged. Modern Art evolved from 'art for art's sake' to creating art increasingly outrageous to the public, increasingly original, and increasingly avant-garde. It became a statement against the bourgeois establishment. World War I significantly influenced art, as traditional art symbolized the bourgeois who sent their generation to war. Artists moved toward non-representational abstract art as protest. Representational art represents something from the real world, while non-representational art is not tied to anything in the real world. Cubism in 1909 was the first concrete manifestation of abstract art. Dadaism in 1917 was created in direct response to World War I, rejecting all representational art as an anarchist movement.

The seven major avant-garde movements of the early 20th century are: German Expressionism (the first major movement), French Expressionism, Cubism (with Picasso as a key figure), Futurism (the last major Italian art movement), Abstract Art (divided into lyrical abstraction led by Kandinsky and geometric abstraction led by Mondrian), Dadaism (a radical movement that deeply influenced contemporary art), and Metaphysical Art (which deals with realities beyond the physical world). Surrealism represents art that goes beyond apparent reality, presenting familiar objects or scenes with particular elements that make them seem unreal or dreamlike. These movements represent the final major avant-garde movements that continue to influence contemporary art.

This comprehensive section establishes the foundational concepts of modernism and avant-garde in art history. Modernism is defined as a new contemporary style representing the last major artistic style, characterized by 'changes' and a new modern aesthetic. Avant-garde, literally meaning 'forward guard' in French, is not a style but a utopian project within modernism that transitions from art to reality. The term was first applied to Russian art by Alexandre Benois but was not self-applied by artists. The era of modernism spans from the 1870s to the mid-20th century, while modern art (модерн) covers the late 19th century to 1914. Modernism represents a socio-cultural paradigm directed toward renewal and breaking with classical art, driven by technological changes, urbanization, and social upheavals at the turn of the century. The expansion of colonial empires brought Europeans into contact with non-Western cultures, including African and Oceanic art. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution challenged religious institutions, while Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (1905) further challenged humanity's understanding of absolute categories. The first decade of the 20th century became a 'crucible' for artistic innovation. A common misconception is that avant-garde emerged completely independently from the past, requiring the destruction of all previous artistic traditions. However, early avant-garde actually emerged at the intersection of traditional understanding and social/technological upheavals. The sense of isolation and fear before the new technical world that could 'crush' individuals became a defining characteristic of European civilization. Artists, as the most sensitive individuals, were among the first to sense the impending catastrophe of World War I. Unlike modernists who sought to create a new style reflecting the new era, avant-garde artists actively blurred the boundaries between art and life, transforming artistic work into a tool for the transformation of human beings and society. The four post-impressionist artists who laid the foundation for new art were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Van Gogh used color subjectively to express himself, with concentrated shades and contrasting color collisions creating emotional tension. Gauguin was among the first artists to actively seek non-European cultures, challenging eurocentrism in painting. He felt European civilization was outdated and dying, representing 'the sunset of Europe.' He traveled to Tahiti seeking primitive cultures that had preserved their identity, becoming one of the founders of French symbolism. Upon arriving in Tahiti, Gauguin completely reconstructed his artistic system, attempting to emulate the principles of primitive culture. He embraced the tendency of primitive cultures toward large, flat surfaces of rich color. Toulouse-Lautrec was one of the first artists to transform the conventional line into an independent expressive medium, capable of conveying emotions and creating moods. He depicted marginal subjects, outcasts, and women of the demi-monde without fear of criticism. By the end of the 19th century, key categories that had built art for millennia, beginning with mimesis and ending with linear perspective, became unimportant.