The revolutionary force of Dadaism lay in the fact that it put the authenticity of art to the test.
The Dadaists made still-lifes out of tickets, spools, cigarette butts that were integrated into painted elements. Then
they showed it to the public: see, the picture-frame explodes time, the tiniest real fragment of everyday life says more
than painting. Just as the bloody fingerprint of a murderer on the page of a book says more than the text. Many
aspects of this revolutionary attitude have made their way into photomontage. You only need to think of the work of
John Heartfield, whose technique made book jackets into a political instrument. But now follow the path of
photography further. What do you see? It becomes more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is
that it can no longer photograph a run-down apartment house or a pile of manure without transfiguring it. Not to
speak of the fact that it would be impossible to say anything about a dam or a cable factory except this: the world is
beautiful. The World is Beautiful—that is the title of a famous book of photographs by Renger-Patsch, in which we see
the photography of the ‘new objectivity’ at its height. It has even succeeded in making misery itself an object of
pleasure, by treating it stylishly and with technical perfection. For the ‘new objectivity’, it is the economic function of
photography to bring to the masses elements which they could not previously enjoy—spring, movie stars, foreign
countries—by reworking them according to the current fashion; it is the political function of photography to renew
the world as it actually is from within, in other words, according to the current fashion.