ELI5: What Is Dada?

Dada is a playful, silly way of looking at the world that turns everyday rules upside down to show that not everything has to be serious or make sense.

Imagine you wake up one morning and decide to wear your shoes on your hands, eat your soup with a fork, and talk to your teddy bear in totally made-up animal sounds. That goofy feeling of breaking the usual rules just to be creative is what Dada is all about.

About a hundred years ago, the world was going through a very sad and serious time with a big war. A group of artists felt that grown-up logic and serious rules were causing too much trouble, so they created Dada as a way to push the reset button through silliness and surprise.

In your everyday life, you can spot the spirit of Dada in a few simple ways:

• Turning trash into treasure: Taking a regular cardboard box, an old sock, and a shiny wrapper, gluing them together, and calling it high-class art.
• Playing with words: Cutting random words out of a newspaper, shaking them in a hat, pulling them out one by one, and reading them out loud as a brand-new poem.
• Using things the wrong way: Taking a plain object, like turning an umbrella upside down to catch falling leaves, just to make people smile and see it differently.