Research: Dadaism

When considering art's reaction to events, you cannot avoid movements such as Dadaism.  The movement was really born out of a reaction to the First World War, its art focused on throwing away the established preconceptions.  Similarly the seeds for the cultural shift towards post-modernism were sown in the aftermath of the Second World War and accelerated by the war in Vietnam.  The artists began to feel that art had to be more than the modernist view of it being a purely aesthetic, rational or documentary experience, it needed to comment on the world to show people the truth and engage them emotionally.