Just as Marcel Duchamp called Dada an anti-art movement, so the Neo-Dadaists promoted their anti-aesthetic agenda. It didn't hurt that Duchamp happened to have moved from Paris to New York and was sharing his ideologies with artistic peers. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns quickly picked up on the philosophy of incorporating nontraditional elements in artwork as they began creating collages and assemblages with found materials.
Neo-Dada art is marked by the incorporation of everyday items, the borrowing of pop culture icons, references to commercial packaging, and the use of absurdist themes. Found objects and the repetition of banal activities were employed as a critique of bourgeois society. Among the artists who identified themselves as Neo-Dadaist are Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Yves Klein, Jean Follett, Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Jim Dine, Robert Raushcenberg and Jasper Johns.
Purists date the Neo-Dada period as beginning in 1958 and ending by 1962. It sprang into public notice toward the end of the Abstract Expressionist era and dispersed as other related movements gained momentum, among them Pop Art, Assemblage, Fluxus and Happenings. At its zenith, Irvin Sandler described Neo-Dada as "an avant-garde fad." Artists since this time have evoked the name Neo-Dada to describe their work. For example, in 2002, the art collective Kroesos Foundation took over Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, the site of the birth of Dadaism. They occupied the space for three months, staging happenings and performances.
The Neo-Dadaists were influenced by and influenced many avant-garde performance and visual art movements. Musician John Cage, whose compositions dependent on chance and the environment, professed a love for Duchamp's vision. Playwright George Brecht, famous for his affecting methods of breaking the fourth wall, staged what he called "events" which had the absurdity of Dada. The Fluxus school's preference for amusement and randomness also drew upon Neo-Dada's style. Probably one of the most famous figures influenced by Neo-Dada is Andy Warhol, whose factory events and paintings of soup cans recall Neo-Dada's adoration of pop imagery.
Critic Marge Bulmer, in her discussion of the assemblages and installations of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, stresses the Neo-Dadaist penchant for satire. In the case of Edward and Nancy, the term was "raging satirist," because their juxtaposition of figures amid decayed, discarded materials addresses the absurdity and despair of the human condition. Walter Hopps, in his catalog essay for a Kienholz retrospective, asserts, "No one ever forgets the first time they see a Kienholz." Here was Neo-Dada at its most successful, using detritus to create a piercing commentary on societal ills.