dadaisdadaisdadaisdadaisdada

No, that's not a plea to the great dada in the creampuff sky nor an invocation to Idi Amin--it's a plea to think of what art that destroys is as much art that constructs. (For a great photo essay of dada, see this Slate article.) ...

According to Eugene Robinson at Washington Post:

The obvious question posed by those two iconic works -- What is art? -- must have seemed unavoidable at a time when the world had gone mad.

To many who lived through it, World War I seemed truly insane, an orgy of purposeless death and destruction. Nearly a century later, it is easier to put the Great War in context. Technological advances had produced new and efficient ways of killing -- machine guns, high explosives, poison gas -- but there had been no time for new war-fighting tactics or appropriate ethics to evolve. The result was a new kind of war that amounted to annihilation for annihilation's sake.