In this image from the Dada magazine 291 edited by Alfred Stieglitz, the title is given as "Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity". However, anyone who had glanced at the image itself would never have given it that title as a result of the contents of the image itself. There is no girl, no nudity, and no person at all. There is a complete divorce from the content of the image and its title. I think this is an artistic statement on the part of the Dadaists, saying that there is no inherent, necessary connection between a piece of art an what it is called. Furthermore, the piece blurs the lines of what ought to be considered art, since if this is considered from a rational point of view, the artist is lying when he writes "Portrait of a Young American Girl..." at the top of the page. However, this lie, or discrepancy at the least, ought to have no effect on the artistic merit of the piece as a whole.

In this way, the text at the top of the page is grouped in along with the image to be considered as part of a unified whole. The artist may be making a statemen about modernity and the efficacy of labelling ideas. I think of the Victorian ideals, Decorum, Progress, Nobility, etc., and how they were twisted by propagandists in the service of the war effort. If people can use these ideas in whichever way they want, the artist seems to be saying, then we might as well affix any label at all to an idea. Furthermore, if this is true, then there never was a real, essential definition of Decorum or Progress as ideas in the first place. The link between a piece of art and its title, similarly, is ultimately arbitrary. The image is just as much a picture of a young American girl as it is a picture of a trash can or a shopping mall. With no meaningful or inherent relationship between words and what they describe or signify, art becomes as juxtapositional as you want. The Dadaists expanded on this idea after the War brought on these questions about art.