Born in Disgust

In 1916, while World War I slaughtered millions, a group of artists and poets in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire decided that the civilization producing such carnage didn't deserve coherent art. They called their movement Dada — a deliberately meaningless word (or a baby's first sound, or French for hobby horse — they never agreed and didn't care).

Dada artists rejected the idea that art should be beautiful, meaningful, or even comprehensible. They performed nonsense poetry, exhibited found objects as sculpture, and created collages from random newspaper clippings. The point was to destroy art's pretensions.