antiart

[ an-tee-ahrt, an-tahy- ]

noun

1. art, as dada, based on total rejection of established artistic practices and aesthetic values in favor of those that are arbitrary, shocking, and meaningless.

Other Words From

• anti·artist noun adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of antiart¹

First recorded in 1940–45; anti- + art ¹

Example Sentences

Both an art movement and an antiart movement, it involved giddy speeches and a man dressed in a cardboard cone.

From Wall Street Journal

"The theater belongs not to the great but to the brash. acting is not for gentlemen, or bureaucratic-academics. what they do is antiart," he wrote in one tweet.

From Seattle Times

No doubt the curators — Isabel Schulz, executive director of the Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Foundation at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany, and Josef Helfenstein, director of the Menil Collection — wanted to correct a mistaken view of Schwitters as an anarchic, antiart wild man.

From New York Times

Two professors got into a shouting match over the exhibit, and Keene has been called everything from a commercial hack to an antiart subversive.

From Time Magazine Archive

As antiart, Duchamp's work became a lunatic cornerstone for Dada, the movement that celebrated disorder, chance, anarchism?anything to reverse the stultified, rational societies that had led to World War I. Thereupon, Duchamp renounced canvas forever.

From Time Magazine Archive