My heart belongs to dada*

The Museum of Modern Art will be hosting the Dada exhibition from June 18 to September 11, 2006, with member previews starting on June 16.

Clive Davis has a post on the exhibit, where he links to Martha Bayles's review of the show when it was at the National Gallery of Art. Martha approached Dada with the necessary irreverence Dada demands from the viewer, unlike the pompous tripe it usually gets from Museum Curators, especially when it comes to contemporary art:

As you walk through these last two sections, keep an eye out for Francis Picabia, a true Dadaist but also a true artist. His intricate forays into mechanical drawing and parodies of commercial illustration are practically the only things worth looking at in these rooms. But that is the point: Picabia, not Duchamp, is typical of Dada. This exhibition is that rare phenomenon, a blockbuster that lays bare the intellectual and aesthetic bankruptcy of the contemporary art scene. The lesson is subtle but unmistakable: The majority of Dadaists were engaged in the old-fashioned business of creating objects, and most of the objects they created can, with some stretching, be called beautiful. Not only that, but when they got up to mischief, they did so with panache.

If they were alive today, they would not be endlessly recycling the same old Dada doodoo. They'd be doing for the art world what your Dadioguide is now doing for you: Pointing to the exit.

Dada may not be everybody's fur-lined cup of tea (yes, I know, Meret Oppenheim's a surrealist), but worth a look, unlike the execrable and boring biennal.

* Pun fully intended.

And in further art news, Duchamp painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa, but don't miss ‘The Ciphere of Leonardo.’ Don't try to drink coffee while you read it.

Update: Pun!

(technorati tags Art, Dada, Meret Oppenheim)