With the dread day of September 8 looming on the horizon, when hundreds of New York galleries open simultaneously, to be followed by the craziness of Performa later in the fall, punctuated daily (now) by absurdist Ryan Trecartin films at MoMA PS1, lockouts of art handlers at Sotheby’s, William Powhida performances and new tweets from Ai Weiwei, let’s look back at where it all began, Jan. 23, 1920, in Paris, through the fractured lens of Tristan Tzara’s Some Memoirs of Dadaism, first published in translation in Vanity Fair magazine in the early 1920s.
