Scene 6
BBC Third Programme Studio. Broadcasting House, London. The interviewer is a brisk young woman. She sits opposite Kurt Schwitters. They both wear large headphones. There is a glass wall between us. INTERVIEWER
This is the BBC Third Programme. We have in the studio today, the leading German exponent of the art of DADA Kurt Schwitters. Herr Doktor Schwitters for your first show in Hanover, instead of critics, you began your career by inviting forty sheep and twenty reindeer?
KURT
Well, I -
INTERVIEWER
Continuing with your life, you invented the term MERZ. MERZ Art can be anything from bus tickets to fox furs. You created a room which was not a room. You built a tower which broke through the roof and when rain began to pour your landlord decided to show you the door.
KURT
I don’t think it was exactly like that -
INTERVIEWER
‘Picasso is a 19th century artist’, you claim ‘He makes works to fit the inside of a pretty gilt frame’. And yet when asked what art means to you, you announce –‘art is the most useless thing in the world to do’.
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