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In many ways, Dada and Surrealism represent the most successful artistic rebellions against capitalist norms, as they have attacked the conventional assumption of meaning itself, and in doing so drew attention to the ridiculous fact that such an assumption existed at all,

 'Dada has often been called nihilistic and its declared purpose was indeed to make clear to the public at large that all established values, moral or aesthetic, had been rendered meaningless by the catastrophe of the Great War... Dada preached nonsense and anti-art with a vengeance'

It is as though the Artist jumped before she was pushed. With its effort to close the gap between producer and produced by making everything equally alien, Surrealism also sought to negate its creator, using,

 'pure psychic automatism... intended to express... the true process of thought... free from the exercise of reason and from any aesthetic or moral purpose' . Habermas, too, asserts that Surrealism poses a threat to art's existential rights, but still fails in two ways,

'First, when the containers of an autonomously developed cultural sphere are shattered, the contents get dispersed. Nothing remains from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory effect does not follow'. Habermas draws attention to the levelling affect of contemporary communication networks: networks which challenge the hierarchical assumptions of classical Marxism, and which have, in scale, surpassed what any postmodern commentator – even in the 1980s- could have imagined. More so than ever, our media are democratic and interrelated,

'A rationalized everyday life, therefore, could hardly be saved from cultural impoverishment through breaking open a single cultural sphere -- art -- and so providing access to just one of the specialized knowledge complexes'.

Any active dissent can be transformed into a commodity, a product to assist the perpetuation of capitalism. Catchy slogans devised by revolutionaries are used to sell mortgages, paintings that challenge conventional assumptions about beauty and form are written about in books to be sold, and bought by galleries where their beauty and form can be admired and valued- bought and sold. As the “Anti-Naturals” recently wrote, on the subject,

“It is the nature of the Spectacle to transform all experience into a consumer commodity. It is no surprise, then, that so much of modern capitalist production should be focused on the authenticity swindle. It is not merely that we are told that our authentic self is only a credit card order away. We must be told what and how to purchase. Since, in the midst of the Spectacle, all experience is real only when it can be consumed, it is natural to follow the guidance offered by the array of products engineered to address each particular need. In reality, it is quite easy to mass market to hundreds of millions of individuals,? since each quest is identical in its basic features.”

Any words spoken against can be turned into rallying support. Art, like any powerful weapon, can always be turned against those who use it.

'Whatever doesn't kill power is killed by it.' In this way the Dadaists watched their anti-art works being systematically categorised as works of art, and were forced to focus their whole本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。