"Vintage Dadaism" T-Shirt

In early 1916 and in the desire to reject traditional modes of artistic creation, many Dadaists worked in collages, photomontage, and found-object construction, rather than in painting and sculpture. Dada did not constitute an actual artistic style, but its proponents favoured group collaboration, spontaneity, and chance. Interestingly, in the beginning, when a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the French word dada (“hobby-horse”), it was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I.