e a little information from the mind of Francis
Picabia, who was until the war conspicuous among the cubists, upon the
subject of dada-ism.

"Dada smells of nothing, nothing, nothing.
It is like your hopes: nothing.
Like your paradise: nothing.
Like your idols: nothing.
Like your politicians: nothing.
Like your heroes: nothing.
Like your artists: nothing.
Like your religions: nothing."

A litany like this coming from one of the most notable dada-ists of
the day, is too edifying for proper expression. It is like a window
opened upon a wide cool place where all parts of one's exhausted being
may receive the kind of air that is imperative to it. For the present,
we may say, a special part of one's being which needs the most and the
freshest air is that chamber in the brain where art takes hold and
flourishes like a bed of fungus in the dark.

What is the use, then, of knowing anything about art until we know
precisely what it is? If it is such an orchidaceous rarity as the
world of worshippers would have us believe, then we know it must be
the parasitic equivalent of our existence feeding upon the health of
other functions and sensibilities in ourselves. The question comes why
worship what we are not familiar with? The war has taught us that
idolatry is a past virtue and can have no further place with
intelligent people living in the present era, which is for us the only
era worth consideration. I have a hobby-horse therefore--to ride away
with, out into the world of intricate common experience; out into the
arena with those who know what the element of life itself is, and that
I have become an expression of the one issue in the mind worth the
consideration of the artist, namely fluidic change. How can anything
to which I am not related, have any bearing upon me as artist? I am
only dada-ist because it is the nearest I have come to scientific
principle in experience. What yesterday can mean is only what
yesterday was, and tomorrow is something I cannot fathom until it
occurs. I ride my own hobby-horse away from the dangers of art which
is with us a modern vice at present, into the wide expanse of
magnanimous diversion from which I may extract all the joyousness I am
capable of, from the patterns I encounter.

The same disgust which was manifested and certainly enjoyed by Duse,
when she demanded that the stage be cleared of actors in order to save
the creative life of the stage, is th