In his review** of The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (1952), the modern art critic Thomas B. Hess posed these questions as the ones he felt we should be asking about dada:[] What has the idea of a collective avant-garde become a matter of such sensitive importance?
[] What makes artists turn so readily to public statements of private positions?
[] How have the elementary strategies of shock and irresponsibility become such elaborate intellectual games?
Below: a portrait of Hess painted by Elaine de Kooning in 1956.
** Saturday Review of Lit,. March 1, 1952, p. 53.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
