Mr. Picabia Breaks with the Dadas
2003; The MIT Press; Volume: 105; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/016228703769684236
ISSN1536-013X
Autores Tópico(s)Art History and Market Analysis
ResumoOCTOBER 105, Summer 2003, pp. 145–146. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I applaud all ideas, but nothing else, only the ideas interest me and not what gravitates around them, profiting from ideas disgusts me. “One has to live,” you tell me? You know as well as I that our existence is short compared to the profit one can gain from an invention; we’re on the earth since the day before yesterday and we’ll die tomorrow. Cubism was born one morning only to die that evening, then Dada appeared and was, actually, just as ephemeral. The evolution continues; some person will find the name of a new package for a bygone spirit, and so forth. The Dada spirit only really existed from 1913 to 1918, an era during which it never stopped evolving and transforming itself. After that time, it became as uninteresting as the output of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or the static elucubrations offered by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise and certain members of the Institute. In the attempt to prolong its life, Dada has closed in upon itself. I am sorry if, with these lines, I’m wounding friends whom I love dearly, or disturbing certain colleagues who perhaps are counting on a profit from Dadaism! I couldn’t tell you what will happen at this point; all I can assure you is that our state of mind is not the same as it was from 1913 to 1920 (if you like), and that consequently it will show itself differently. Don’t think that I’m standing in my shirtsleeves at midnight in July, contemplating the moon, don’t worry, I have my good sense—if there is such a thing as good sense! What I am sure of is that it is impossible to stop movement. Money itself has value—or it doesn’t; paper would perhaps be worth more than gold if it were given to me to discover gold mines as large as the coal pits of Cardiff. People class individuals into two categories: “unserious” and “serious.” No one until now has been able to explain to me what a serious man is. I will make the attempt here myself. I think that you call a man serious when he is able to provide for his neighbors, his family, his friends, on condition that to these ends he put the interest on his capital to work. An unserious man is one who confuses interest with capital, and doesn’t seek to make dollars
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