Having a Telephone is Boring. Not Having a Telephone is Boring

I applaud all ideas, but nothing else, only the ideas interest me and not what gravitates around them, profiting from ideas disgusts me. "One has to live," you tell me? You know as well as I that our existence is short compared to the profit one can gain from an invention; we're on the earth since the day before yesterday and we'll die tomorrow. Cubism was born one morning only to die that evening, then Dada appeared and was, actually, just as ephemeral. The evolution continues; some person will find the name of a new package for a bygone spirit, and so forth.

The Dada spirit only really existed from 1913 to 1918, an era during which it

never stopped evolving and transforming itself. After that time, it became as

uninteresting as the output of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or the static elucubrations

offered by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise and certain members of the Institute. In the

attempt to prolong its life, Dada has closed in upon itself. I am sorry if, with these

lines, I'm wounding friends whom I love dearly, or disturbing certain colleagues

who perhaps are counting on a profit from Dadaism!

I couldn't tell you what will happen at this point; all I can assure you is that

our state of mind is not the same as it was from 1913 to 1920 (if you like), and that consequently it will show itself differently. Don't think that I'm standing in my shirtsleeves at midnight in July, contemplating the moon, don't worry, I have my good sense-if there is such a thing as good sense! What I am sure of is that it is impossible to stop movement. Money itself has value-or it doesn't; paper would perhaps be worth more than gold if it were given to me to discover gold mines as large as the coal pits of Cardiff. People class individuals into two categories: "unserious" and "serious."No one until now has been able to explain to me what a serious man is. I will make the attempt here myself. I think that you call a man serious when he is able to provide for his neighbors, his family, his friends, on condition that to these ends he put the interest on his capital to work. An unserious man is one who confuses interest with capital, and doesn't seek to make dollars with his ideas-from an artistic viewpoint, a copyist at the Louvre will always be more serious than I am! Dada, you see, was not serious, and that is why it won over the world like wildfire. If some people take it seriously now, that's because it's dead! Many people will call me a killer, but they're deaf and shortsighted. Anyway, there are no killers; are tuberculosis and typhoid killers? Are we in control of our lives? In my opinion, there is only one killer, the one who created the world. But, since no one created the world, there are no killers, Dada will live forever! And thanks to that, art dealers will make their fortune, publishers will treat themselves to cars, writers will get the Legion of Honor, and I ... will stay Francis Picabia!

One must be a nomad, traveling through ideas as one travels through countries and cities, eating parakeets and hummingbirds, swallowing live marmosets, sucking the blood of giraffes, feeding on the feet of panthers! One must sleep with gulls, dance with a boa constrictor, make love with heliotropes, and wash one's feet in vermilion! One must disguise church interiors as ocean liners and ocean liners as artichokes with cream, make statues come out of the sea and recite verses to passing steamers, go out naked then put on a tuxedo at home; one must hear confessors' confessions, never again see the people one knows, above all, never put the same woman twice in one's bed, unless one has a mistress who cheats on you every day with a new lover! All that is a lot easier than the faith of a copper- smith, who always laughs at what's funny and finds black dark and white light. The coppersmith warms up in the sun because he's cold; don't be cold, and you'll see how much the sun looks like rain!

Existence is tolerable really only on condition that one lives among people who have no ulterior motives, no opportunists, but that would be asking the impossible...Talent doesn't exist, masterpieces are just documents, truth is the pivot on the scale. Everything is boring, no? Falling leaves are boring, new leaves are boring, heat is boring, cold is boring. Grandfather clocks that don't chime are boring, those that do chime are boring. Having a telephone is boring, not having a telephone is boring. People who die are boring, just as are those who don't! Look how badly the world is put together, why doesn't our brain have the force of our desires? But all that matters very little, paintings in museums are masterpiece- fossils. A man is called tasteful because he shares the taste of others; for you, life is a guitar on which one plucks only the same tune forever. 

Translated by Matthew S. Witkovsky.

Francis Picabia, "M. Picabia se sépare des dadas," Comoedia, May 11, 1921, reprinted in Francis Picabia, Ecrits 2, ed. Olivier Revault d'Allonnes (Paris: P. Belfond, 1978), pp. 14-15.