an early 20th-cent. movement in art and literature based on deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional artistic values. Dada was one of the main influences on surrealism
Dada was not a style. It was, as André Breton (1896–1966) said, a state of mind. Born during World War I in Zurich, it took the utter bankruptcy of conventional society, art, literature and thought as its starting point. Instead, it inculcated anti-art and unreason through ironic and anarchic gestures (which paradoxically often proved a fertile inspiration for later art) — Martin Gayford
Dadaism noun
Dadaist noun and adj
Dadaistic /-ʹistik/ adj
[French dada hobbyhorse, title of a review; said to have been chosen because it sounded meaningless or childish]