Tristan Tzara (born April 16, 1896 – died December 25, 1963) was an artist from Romania and France who was known for starting the Dadaist movement. He was interested in symbolism and was more on the nihilistic side of Dada than others.
Dadaism
Dadaism is an avant-garde intellectual movement. It started around World War 1. Although not at first an art movement, it did influence art greatly for a time.
The movement, formed in Zurich, Switzerland, was heavily influenced by the war in Europe. Its artists rejected modern capitalist society. They used nonsense and protest in their works. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent with violence, war, and nationalism, and were close to the radical far-left. The whole point behind Dadaism was to prove that anything could be art if the artist declared it to be. This was to prove that if everything could be art, then nothing could be art. This outraged many artists as Dadaism deemed their labour intensive artworks meaningless.
The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture.
Its peak was 1916 to 1922, and it influenced surrealism, pop art, and punk rock. It went against the standards of society.
Followers of Dadaism included Antonin Artaud, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali. A later version, called "Neo-Dada", arose in the 1960s.
Dadaism began in central Europe, in Berlin and Zurich. Dadaism moved to Paris with Tristan Tzara. Tzara would go on to 'lead' the dadaists of Paris such as as Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Marcel Duchamp.
Dadaism is also closely associated with the concepts of the grotesque, the absurd, and the macabre. The idea of ridiculing the absurdity of existence has its expression in the dramatic art of Samuel Beckett and the so called school of Paris, which included Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet, and Eugene O'Neill.
The word "Dada" may be an allusion to an infant's first words, such as "Mama". No-one knows who invented the name, but there is some historical evidence which says that Tzara picked it out at random from a German-French dictionary, since "Dada" means "hobbyhorse" in French. A hobbyhorse is a long stick with a toy horse head attached which a child can hold in front of them to pretend they are riding a horse. Still, the source of the name is not widely agreed upon.
Rutaceae
Rutaceae is a commonly known as the Rue or Citrus family, is a family of flowering plants, usually placed in the order Sapindales.
Symbolism (art)
Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin. The movement rejected realism and naturalism, and included poetry and other arts. Symbolists believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly. Thus a symbolist painting may "look" realistic, but actually it represents a non-visual idea.
In literature, the style started with the publication "Les Fleurs du mal" ("The Flowers of Evil", 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The name "symbolist" itself was first used by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented it to distinguish the symbolists from similar styles of literature and art. Symbolism in art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism.
There were several groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, including Gustave Moreau, Gustav Klimt, Odilon Redon, Henri Fantin-Latour, Gaston Bussière, Edvard Munch, Félicien Rops, and Jan Toorop. Symbolism in painting was even more widespread geographically than symbolism in poetry. Its ideas affected Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas Roerich, Martiros Saryan, Mikhail Nesterov, Léon Bakst, Elena Gorokhova in Russia, as well as Frida Kahlo in Mexico and David Chetlahe Paladin in the United States. Auguste Rodin is sometimes considered a symbolist sculptor.
The symbolist painters used mythological and dream imagery. The symbols used by symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, symbolism in painting influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau style and Les Nabis.
Alliaceae
Alliaceae is a family of herbaceous perennial flowering plants. They are part of order Asparagales.
Metalogic
Metalogic is the science of reasoning about the arguments that are in logic itself. While logic deals with external truths, metalogic deals with truths that lie while using logic.
Rationality
Rationality is the state that exists when reason is used. It's also related to moderation in some contexts and sensibility in others.
When a person is reasonable or rational they are using all available information to make a decision, and whether their decision can be judged as rational or reasonable depends on the reasons they made it. If they believe that the most important factor in any decision is how they will personally benefit, then self-interested or even selfish behavior would be rational. But if they believe that benefiting a group of people is more important than benefiting just one person, then purely selfish behavior is irrational. Determinations of rationality depend on context, the background information and assumptions.
Universal reason
Universal reason is something that philosophers think is at the bottom of a thinking system that allows it to understand certain natural things that are generally complex.
Plutocracy
Plutocracy is a government by people who are rich.
Corruption
Corruption is a system that starts out good but somehow goes wrong. The word comes from a Latin word meaning "Rotting". Corruption could be a government doing what they say is good, but instead oppress people, or an official doing something wrong. It can also mean a computer file or computer program which malfunctions or becomes infected with a computer virus.
Sometimes the term just means bribery.
Oppression
Oppression is when a person or group of people who have power use it in a way that is not fair, unjust or cruel. It can also describe the feeling of people who are oppressed. Oppressive governments can lead to a rebellion.
Racism, sexism and other prejudices can cause oppression, especially if laws are made based on them.
Anarchists say that all government, police and laws are oppressive. This is because they stop people from doing whatever they want to.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the idea of human rights in general, is meant to stop oppression.
Meritocracy
A meritocracy is the condition where people who deserve to can go up in rank, as opposed to a system like nepotism. It applies generally to all positions to which people may be appointed. It is often reinforced by laws, such as that women should have equal opportunities to men in employment.
The philosopher Plato thought that a government based on merit was better than democracy. In democracy, there is no guarantee that you will get the best person, the most qualified person, ruling the state. His criticisms were really of Athenian (or direct) democracy, where anyone could be selected to rule.
In a meritocracy, the people are chosen who are thought to be the best. Some have accused it of being elitist, saying that government by the best will mean that only those who have had the right opportunities will have a chance to govern, creating in effect a ruling class.
It is worth pointing out that Plato did not see it this way. He believed that philosophers were the best people to rule because they were "disinterested", meaning they only had the interests of the state in mind, not their own interest. Plato's point was this: if you want to rule, then it will go wrong, because power will corrupt you. If you are a philosopher, you don't care about power all you care about is truth, so you will rule well, without being interested in your power or status.
Nepotism