point of view using evidence including artists and their works

The statement "artist frequently break traditions in order to challenge the audience's perception"
can be supported when addressing the art movement Dada. Dadaists such as Marcel Duchamp and
Kurt Schwitters produced unconventional art works that provoked the audience to consider what
art really was.
One of the first large scaled movements to translate art into provocative action. From 1915 Dada
produced many of the most anarchic, playful, antibourgeois, anti-rational, confrontational and
nihilistic works made during the twentieth century. Dada began as an indictment of the bourgeois
values responsible for the horrors of the war, and assumed many forms such as outrageous
performances, festivals, readings, erotic mechanomorphic art, nonsensical chance, generated
poetry, found objects, and political satire in photomontage. Its main purpose, however, whether it
carried a social or political message or not, was to shock the audience.
The art works produced by Dadaists was something created with unconventional form and
produced by unorthodox means challenging the audience's perception as to what art was. In
previous years, artist had been limited to certain styles of art by their patrons. Patrons
commissioned artworks to convey authority and power, ensure fame and memory, or to
demonstrate their spiritual virtues and worthiness. Hence, the audience had been lulled into
believing the definition of art was to convey such aspects in a precise a manner as possible. The
Catholic Church and government institutions had been major art patrons up until the late
nineteenth century. By this time it had become more common for artists to sell their work
uncommissioned. This system allowed artists to work more independently and nurture new ideas.
The purpose to challenge the audience is clearly seen in Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1951)
as two common place items have been put together, given a title, and exhibited be a practising
artist - hence, been transformed into a work of art.
The Bicycle Wheel consists of a wheel joined on top of a stool, which relates to traditional
displayment of sculptures on an elaborate base therefore making an "anti-art establishment"
statement. It also appears to comment on mechanisation, the wheel being the invention which
eventually led to the mechanical age.
This is an example of a Ready-Made, a form of art invented by Duchamp which he conceived by
his cerebral pursuit of quasi-philisophical inquiries.
It is because this piece did not fit the mold of the audience's perception of art, that the focal
purpose of Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel may be seen as to raise questions in the audience such as:

where is the traditional skill of the sculpture as carver, modeler or in casting metal? How is it
beautiful, "precious" and original? Is it traditional skill and originality that makes something art?
Kurt Schwitters' Merzz 19 is composed of overlapping pieces of address labels, food stamps, coat
checks and other fragments of paper with frayed edges arranged against a blue background.
Merzz 19 carries a political and social comment, also like Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, in that
Schwitters created something new from the discarded fragments of the past, just as postwar
Germans had to do with their cities.
Schwitter was able to transform rubbish, the discarded items of his surroundings, into strange and
wonder items of beauty. His choice of unconventional material, use of ready-mades to create
collages, and his random collection of objects and the notion of his art as being "meaningless"
defined him as a Dadaist.
Unconventional and unorthodox approaches or methods used by Dadists such a Duchamp and
Schwitters, assaulted traditional notions of what art should be, hence giving truth to the statement
"artist frequently break traditions in order to challenge the audience's perception."