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10 
DADA PAINTING OR THE OIL-EYE 
T HE bigwig, reality, is the straw man of tickertape-brains 
which daily retails its gallons of philosophy, fire-works, 
morals, science, politics and perfumes; he it is who for 
the most part supports the vulgar idiots that painters 
usually are. Sight is the suction pipe of his material. 
Sight is the lowest sense, so low that it should simply be worn 
under the sole of one’s boot. It is the enemy of poets. It is true 
that poets .... but all the same, after the game of heads and 
tails, they are the most suave consolation of our days. The eye 
throws the dirt, which it has absorbed from outside, into the 
wheels of fantastic imagination and prevents them from turning. 
Scarcely has the brain begun to weave charming chains of illogi 
cal and boneless flowers when the hydra springs into one’s eye to 
recall one to virtue. It is impossible not to see, except at night or 
in a cellar, but it is there that painters decay. Poets can be 
blind. Painters can not and yet it is the only condition under 
which they would be able to wave from the top of minarets their 
peacock plumed hats that should tickle the heart and bowels of 
the amateur of amateurs. 
The cubists are pale succubae whom grabbing prostitution, 
freshly painted with the old putrefaction of aesthetic morgues, 
comes to visit. After a few slaps on the behind of the bourgeois 
impressionist women, they send off into the sky pretty rockets 
of mud and caramels. They are delicious and as prolific as flies, 
mice and lice. 
The dadaistes are not the sons of the cubists. Some among 
them once dipped a finger into the bouillon cube and immedi 
ately put it in their mouths to see what kind of a taste it had. 
There is no one who has not sometime in his life taken an emetic. 
They are neither sons nor fathers of anyone. No prophets an 
nounced them. 
The grumblings of the legal painter put them outside paint 
ing entirely. It seems that only the gorillas and the monkeys 
with their blue buttocks have the right to paint, this being the 
art of obscene grimaces, palatable or tearful before the thighs, 
the apples or the horizons. The dadapainters are outside the 
plastic? They would be especially favored if they could escape