Dadaism was an avant-garde "anti-art" movement that emerged in Zurich, Switzerland, around 1916, during the height of World War I. It was a direct and furious reaction against the logic, reason, and bourgeois values that its proponents believed had led to the senseless carnage of the war. Dada sought to mock and destroy traditional notions of art and culture, which its members saw as meaningless and corrupt.

Figures like poet Tristan Tzara and artist Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire championed nonsense, irrationality, and absurdity as the only valid responses to a world gone mad. The movement was defined by its experimental techniques, including the use of chance operations, photomontage, and most famously, the "readymade"—an everyday object presented as art, perfected by Marcel Duchamp with works like Fountain. While it aimed to be a nihilistic end to art, Dada's radical questioning of what art could be laid the essential groundwork for Surrealism (which many Dadaists joined) and later movements like Conceptual Art.

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