enience of myself and a few others that I
take up the issue of adherence. An expressionist is one who expresses
himself at all times in any way that is necessary and peculiar to him.
A dada-ist is one who finds no one thing more important than any other
one thing, and so I turn from my place in the scheme from
expressionist to dada-ist with the easy grace that becomes any
self-respecting humorist.

Having fussed with average intelligence as well as with average
stupidity over the various dogmatic aspects of human experience such
as art, religion, philosophy, ethics, morals, with a kind of
obligatory blindness, I am come to the clearest point of my vision,
which is nothing more or less than the superbly enlightening discovery
that life as we know it is an essentially comic issue and cannot be
treated other than with the spirit of comedy in comprehension. It is
cause for riotous and healthy laughter, and to laugh at oneself in
conjunction with the rest of the world, at one's own tragic vagaries,
concerning the things one cannot name or touch or comprehend, is the
best anodyne I can conjure in my mind for the irrelevant pains we take
to impress ourselves and the world with the importance of anything
more than the brilliant excitation of the moment. It is thrilling,
therefore, to realize there is a healthy way out of all this dilemma
of habit for the artist. One of these ways is to reduce the size of
the "A" in art, to meet the size of the rest of the letters in one's
speech. Another way is to deliver art from the clutches of its
worshippers, and by worshippers I mean the idolaters and the
commercialists of art. By the idolaters I mean those whose reverence
for art is beyond their knowledge of it. By the commercialists I mean
those who prey upon the ignorance of the unsophisticated, with
pictures created by the esthetic habit of, or better to say, through
the banality of, "artistic" temperament. Art is at present a species
of vice in America, and it sorely and conspicuously needs prohibition
or interference.

It is, I think, high time that those who have the artistic habit
toward art should be apprised of the danger they are in in assuming of
course that they hold vital interest in the development of
intelligence. It is time therefore to interfere with stupidity in
matters of taste and judgment. We learn little or nothing from habit
excepting repetitive imitation. I should, for the benefit of you as
reader, interpose her