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A spectre haunted the Lützow-Ufer – the spectre of Dadaism It hung from the ceiling and peered down from the walls, it sat on pedestals and screamed from posters:‘TAKE DADA SERIOUSLY’ – only to add, winking at the visitor, ‘it’s worth it’  In Summer 1920 the Kunsthandlung Dr Otto Burchard, a Berlin art gallery near the bustling Potsdamer Platz and lush Tiergarten, was the venue for the First International Dada Fair, and its invitation card promised revolution   The Dadaistic person is the radical opponent of exploitation; the logic of exploitation creates nothing but fools, and the Dadaistic person hates stupidity and loves nonsense! Thus, the Dadaistic person shows himself to be truly real, as opposed to the stinking hypocrisy of the patriarch and to the capitalist perishing in his armchair  This exclamatory mood prevailed inside the small venue In a mockery of an academic, salon-style exhibition, its walls were covered with large typographic posters, small frames with photomontages, with cut-outs, and with expansive paintings that used traditional oils as much as rough materials that looked like they were picked up from the gutters which the paintings depicted Collage, montage and found images were the common denominators in the cacophony of carnivalistic commands hurled at the spectator: ‘Finally open up your mind!’ shouted one large photographic poster; ‘Against Art!’ another From the ceiling hung a horrible mannequin, a human shape with a pig’s mask stuffed into a German military uniform, looming grotesquely over artworks and visitors alike   The artist list reads like a who’s who of the Berlin Dada art world in the 1920s: Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Wieland Herzfelde and many other now famous figures of European art history all contributed to the exhibition: Hausmann, agitator and polemicist, had penned the invitation’s pointed manifesto; Dix had sent paintings certain to antagonise traditional taste; Grosz played a central role in organising the event and Herzfelde contributed significantly to the exhibition’s catalogue  Theirs was a rambunctious, chest-beating, clamorous affair The fair asserted its opposition to the traditional tastes, artistic media, and forms of organisation of