"The Dada movement's outrageous provocations have prompted many to define it as 'anti-art' — a term the Dadaists themselves used. This exhibition argues, however, that Dada's shock tactics were meant less as a wholesale disavowal of art than a complete and radical rethinking of its definitions and rules. Dada held at its core a profound ethical stance against contemporary social and political conditions. Its oppositional strategies — the exploitation of nontraditional artistic materials, mining of mass media, destruction of language, exploration of the unconscious, and cutting and pasting of photo-montage — irrevocably altered perceptions of what qualifies as art, in ways that continue to be powerfully resonant today."