Koons, Dada

Great article by Martin Filler for NYRB attacking the Koons retrospective at the Whitney, with strong words for Dada:

Dadaism, which erupted a hundred years ago in the midst of World War I, may be one of the most misunderstood developments in twentieth-century art. There is a purity, almost an innocence, about the carnivalesque impurity of the original Dadaists and their objects and their ideas... Art, Duchamp worried, is “a habit-forming drug,” and with the readymade he somehow hoped to break the habit, which is perhaps what every artist hopes to do by inventing art anew. Jean Arp, one of the very first Dadaists—he was also and almost simultaneously one of the great classicists of twentieth-century sculpture—wrote that “Dada wished to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order.”