The Dada group were acutely anti-art – and despite all multiple machinations had an urgent socio-political program. Duchamp’s submission of a public urinal was an act of satire not of inspiration, and blatantly thus. Hans Richter’s book on the Dada movement mentions a moment when he and Duchamp attended a Paris retrospective with Duchamp laughing at the audience crowding a ‘fountain’ sculpture plinth, “Don’t they understand it was all a joke. I was ‘taking the piss’, quite literally. These works have no aesthetic value, they’re stupid, ugly, pointless pieces; by design.” For spoofing the official Academy conservatives’ rank rejection of modern young yahoos – nobody proposed a ceramic pissoir as a work of art.
  Artists since offer up their founds; those lights and sounds; in obscure, abstruse installations. Catacomb constructions. Rayonist suprematisms. Aleatoric schotasticism. Yadda yadda. But unless your feature has a unique essence, what’s the point? You need only ever create one masterpiece to make your mark.
  Duchamp got bored and went to New York to champion chess – said he’d said it all. As Rimbaud had retired at 19-yrs-old and left to run guns across Arabia; in the 1880s was told he was famous by touring students and sniggered was all a load of crap. As Breton boasted, ‘Art is stupidity.’ As John Lennon snarled, “They’re only songs.” Prissy prime movers like to pretend esoteric inspiration – to play it by ear, depending on season and inclination. John Lydon vowed on leaving some jungle, “I’ve changed the world twice. I guess I’ll do it again,” then came and sold us teevee butter. As it should be.
  Max Weber wrote of religious chapters being charged by a hyper-hypnotic character – the cult expanding on its prophet’s death as followers exploit his ‘charismatic overflow’. First the martyr then the gift shop – seems to be the chosen business modus. And, one readily adopted by avant-garde artists – there’s always a powerful salient smartarse stood centre-stage, his coattails ridden by mediocre manqués. Guy Debord gave us international Lettrists split from a sundered surrealist movement set on the whims of André Breton had come from Dada was driven by Tzara who annexed a Futurism formed and funded by Filippo Marinetti who based his credo on Alfred Jarry as sarcastic symbolist Pataphysician – who seems to have set the whole thing off? Unless you count Baudelaire or dingbat Diderot, maybe Rousseau, right back to Villon?
  Ezra Pound was a similar singular potent polymath – might have changed the world if he wasn’t such a wanker. He certainly affected new wavers of his day – Joyce, Brooke, Elliot, even young Hemingway might never have happened without his notes. Was a faltering fan of Leo Frobenius, the ethno-eccentric had a cool, canny concept of, Kulturkreise – when cultural traits travel round the globe; also Paideuma, a geo-gestalt – how economic ethics can ebb and flow; creeping culture as an organism.
  These true believers were dog disgusted when their work became product. The paintings, poems, films, sculptures, songs devalorised, underrated, cold commodified. They came to see artworks as casual, irrelevant, retro-residual recordings of a life – while the real man lives it. From men had lived through an actual World War.
  Dadaists were the first professional creatives to attack the set establishment with genuine resolve. They saw that western culture was heading for the sewer, and told us so.