The great unspoken secret of "modern, post-modern, whatever art," snickered behind the hands holding the Chablis, is that it is all a con. Selling the idea of the "artwork" is the whole trick. There is no technical mastery, hours of study and practice at a discipline like painting or sculpture, no searching or revelation of the soul. It's about networking and schmoozing and logrolling among a talentless group whose greatest talents are salesmanship and self-promotion. To support them they have a following of gullible "art lovers" who are as clueless and malleable as Rush's dittoheads. Calling something that looks like a garbage can threw up "art" is a joke. And so we bid adieu to one of the drollest comedians of the Twentieth Century. Will we every see his like again? Well there is that guy who sells his canned poop by the ounce at whatever an ounce of gold is selling for.

Ideas for a Rauschenberg tribute:

Run over a sack of potatoes with a BMW and call it "The Troubles."

Shatter a mirror then glue the pieces on a cereal box and call it "Failed Therapy."

Erase a tape of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and call it "Ode to Silence."

Fill a giant ash tray with lip-stick stained cigarette butts and call it "Cancer Diet."

Hollow out a large old console TV leaving the screen intact, fill it with used cat litter and call it "Campaign Coverage."

Glue the contents of a random garbage can to a large canvas, leaving most of it blank, and call it "Legacy."

Nice but not quite exactly right.

For any modern work of art, if the viewer response isn't an immediate 'blow me,' then the work is considered a failure.

I am curious if either of you actually goes to see modern or contemporary art in person. I think it makes a difference in how you feel about it.

I never really understood Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko until I stood in front of their paintings. There just isn't any way a photo of their work can let you see it right - you miss the scale, you miss the dimensionality, you miss all sorts of important things about it. I found the difference particularly profound with Pollock, whose work does tend to look like a pile of multicolored spaghetti when you see a picture in a magazine, but it's true of any number of contemporary artists.

Rothko and Pollack are modern, not postmodern. In fact, you're reaching back about 50 years for your examples.

Erase a tape of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and call it "Ode to Silence."

"Fill a giant ash tray with lip-stick stained cigarette butts and call it "Cancer Diet."

"Hollow out a large old console TV leaving the screen intact, fill it with used cat litter and call it "Campaign Coverage."

"Glue the contents of a random garbage can to a large canvas, leaving most of it blank, and call it "Legacy."

LOL, that's hilarious. I think I would be one of your biggest buyers!!

Nerdram, et al,

You don't like art. You think it's a swindle. You think saying so makes you look smart, like hey, nobody can take YOU for a sucker, right?

You're at a wake, and you're pissing on the departed, and why? Because he was an artist and you don't like art.

And these oh-so-smart fake homages have one thing in common: they're stupid. But that's the point, isn't it? You don't get his work, so you say stupid stuff to mock your own lack of understanding -- how witty of you! How droll!

nerdnam:

Rothko and Pollack are modern, not postmodern. In fact, you're reaching back about 50 years for your examples.

Well, the original post said "modern, post-modern, whatever art," so it seemed reasonable to pick those examples, especially since they were working in the same time frame as Rauschenberg. Besides, people who actually pay attention generally say "contemporary" rather than "post-modern," which is really more of an architecture term.

But if you want more recent art, okay, I'll give you Jenny Holzer as an example. Her show at the Guggenheim maybe ten years ago was a revelation.

Heck, there's also Damien Hirst. The shark, for instance, sounds ludicrous, but I saw it last year and was surprised. It's not something I'd care to own, mind you, but it does have an interesting way of drawing you into its orbit while you're looking at it.

And, actually, that's an important point. I see a lot of art, and there's some I like and some I don't. Rauschenberg isn't my favorite, any more than Hirst, but I don't have to like a particular work for it to be good or for me to acknowledge that it's good. (My wife, who has formal training in art history, doesn't care for Renoir, which doesn't stop her from acknowledging the quality of the work or its importance to the development of art.) Your comments, and Shafer's, suggest mostly to me that you just don't like Rauschenberg. That's your privilege, certainly, but it has no bearing on the question of whether his work was significant or not.

I like art well enough, I just don't like the kind of empty, jokey, 'irony' ridden art that we have today. What we have today is more like anti-art, art that's against talent or originality or spontaneity or even humanity. What we really have is mostly just retreaded kitsch. Look at what just sold for record millions:

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Why in the world should anybody care about that stuff? It doesn't care about us, why should we care about it? This is art from the know-it-alls, and the know-it-alls are the last people who should be doing art. This is art for people who are against anything that's outside of their small knowing worlds.

We've already got enough irony going around; too many know-it-alls who think they are somehow clever. Why do we need any more of it? We've got a war that isn't a war, based on facts that weren't facts, led by a dumbass of a president who thinks he's the plasticine second coming of Winston Churchill or Harry Truman. We've got pundits who act like comedians, comedians who act like journalists, celebrities who want to be politicians, and politicians who want to be johns and stall stompers. We've got people who want to say 'pimp' but don't want to mean it, we’ve got little girls in four inch high heels who don't want to mean that either. Nobody wants to mean what they say or be who they are, nobody is any good at anything they do, and nobody can stay in love with anybody else. Instead of a world of hip, clever people, we've got a world of hypocritical incompetents. And I for one am tired of it.

Maybe what we need is a little less irony and a lot more honesty. How about THAT for some zany new progressive art? When was the last time that was done? Who can predict what might come of doing that? That's why I suggested in the other thread that maybe the cure for postmodernism is lots of Hank Williams--b/c, you see, every Hank Williams song is an irony free zone. And maybe we need to start doing without irony, because right now we're so drowned in irony that we've become predictable, tired bores.

Randy-khan ( if that is your real virtual name) I have seen a lot of "modern/post modern, etc." art, including several Pollock canvases. As you said, the dimensionality is impressive, the patience he showed dribbling threads of paint onto those massive areas in layer after layer is remarkable. I can only imagine what all that did to his back. But it showed patience, not artistic talent. My problem with Rauschenberg and the rest is that their work is considered important. The vapid nonsense surrounding their mythos gives the impression that intelligence and refined tastes in this country can only be presented as a farce. It justifies the attitudes of people like religious zealots and Republicans that the pursuit of truth and beauty through art is not only a waste of time, it is an effete sham. I love art, oxboggle, and feel that through our paintings, sculpture, music, writing, architecture, we can strive for a higher plane, ennoble ourselves and the rest of humanity. To me, people who pretend to create art while laughing up their sleeves are trying to make something beautiful ugly. The best representation of the best in a society is shown through what that society considers great art. In the world of modern art, the most important and influential piece is DuChamp's "Fountain," a urinal he bought and signed with a funny name. I'm sure that somewhere the next "genius" is flinging his poo at a canvas made of diapers. Art as excrement is where this began and where it will end.

First, I'm contemplating the notion of a "real" virtual name versus, well, I don't know what. (I'll just say, in that regard, that a certain group of people who knew me in the early 1980s would know who I am from this name.)

That aside, the thing with the Pollock drip paintings is that there's really a lot going on in them that's beyond workmanship (although it's worth noting that the amount of work and technique involved in those paintings belies the notion that modern or contemporary art requires no training). There are things lurking in those paintings - they remind me a little of the famous picture of Picasso's drawing of a bull down with a flashlight - and the longer you look at them, the more you see.

And the Pollock drip paintings, to me at least, are beautiful.

I think a lot of people have a problem with art that is about something. Jenny Holzer (to repeat an example, but she's particularly apt in this case) gets some very strong reactions because she's "just" using words. But fixing the truisms into a medium like an LED display or a set of benches forces you to think about their meaning, and how they relate to your life. It's actually not any different in concept than the old still life tradition, where specific elements were included to convey a moral message (the fly, for instance, as a memento mori).

And I'm not so sure I would conclude laughing up your sleeve is any indication of the quality of your art. One of the great artists of the 20th century, Alexander Calder, made work that was full of little jokes (as the film of his circus performance demonstrates), but the tradition is very long, extending even to the men who carved gargoyles in the great cathedrals of Europe. Lots of great artists have included jokes of various sorts in their work - Michelangelo even has one in The Last Judgment, after all.

Meanwhile, I recall that the Impressionists, Gauguin and the Fauves all were characterized as degenerate and contributing to the decline of civilization. Artists constantly struggle against the boundaries of what is considered art; in fact the history of art more or less since the end of the Dark Ages has been about the subversion of accepted norms. There are things we consider commonplace in art today that were radical in the 19th century, like depicting factories and train stations, and artists were excoriated for painting those places. In 100 years, Rauschenberg may turn out to be Salieri to somebody else's Mozart, but I think it's a fair bet that some of the artists that people in this thread are decrying will end up in the pantheon.

Just out of curiosity, all you who are criticizing Rauschenberg, and the art of the last fifties years in general. What do you like? Honestly, pony up: name the last artist you thought was really first rate. It would help the rest of us see where you're coming from.

Telemachus,

You want the sublime and you think it's up to artists and musicians to get you there and give you some. That's their job: waiters and tour-guides to that higher plane you long to visit, American Plan, for short vacations. So you're mad at Mister Field and his Fountain, since you can see the insult he intended, and you can see that you're its target. It never fails to impress me that such a small object, chosen for one of our tedious little fiestas of connoisseurship, still has such an ability to get under the skins of the heirs of the bourgeois aesthetes at/for whom it was intended.

You want to piss on art, lover boy? Here you go. Duchamp takes the piss, and does it piss you off? Does it ever.

This is the higher plane. There is no other. If you want to live right, here there are simple, well-known rules for doing so. I too love art, but I'm not stupid enough to think it loves me back, or that it owes me some kind of cheap grace, or a living. As someone who had the poor taste to wander into a funeral and yammer there about how the guest of honor was a sadly overrated fraud, you know a lot about cheap grace.

Or perhaps you have Asperger's syndrome. That would explain the rage at dead people and the weird locutions like "laughing up their sleeves." There's a lot of it around, these days.

Envoi: if you want to ennoble humanity, send a check to Oxfam and shrink your carbon footprint. And work on your breathing; always a good idea. And find some positive way of supporting what you admire. And don't think about money so much. Or think about it better.

Art is not excrement; art is art. The miracle of capitalism is it turns everything into money, including both art and shit. It's a kind of transubstantiation, or a sublimation, maybe. That's why Duchamp's work including *Fountain*) is so full of gags about alchemy. Apply enough money and art becomes shit, while shit becomes sublime. And where is BEAUTY in all this? Keep breathing, and it will come to you.

NadiaBlue, yours is a fair question, and goes to the heart of my problem with Rauschenberg. Salvador Dali is my favorite artist of all eras. His work is not just clever and original, his mastery of the painting medium is awe inspiring. Unfortunately it is difficult for me to think of another artist within the last 50 years I admire outside of some commercial artists. Some of the album covers and movie posters of the last few decades have become iconic, and the effects of the comic strip and comic book artists on the rest of the media have been groundbreaking. So my real problem with many of the artists featured as important is that their work is not just ugly, and inspires no thought other than trying to figure out what is so good about it, it rewards and promotes the wrong people. I'm sure there are many excellent artists who might have been considered great in another time, whose work will never receive the sort of attention that a grotesque, but clever, representation of an every day object might. The emphasis on clever mediocrity places the focus of the aspiring artist and the art world on junk, quite literally.

Oxboggle, I am not at a funeral, this is an online magazine that allows people to comment on their articles. And I am glad for the opportunity to voice my opinion on the state of art, just as you are glad for the opportunity to state your opinion on our opinions. But why all the anger? You only insulted me, but I notice in other posts where you resort to name calling. Didn't anyone tell you that the first one in an argument to resort to cursing or vituperation is conceding the point? It's like playing the Hitler card or telling someone, "I'll pray for you," when your side of the debate collapses.

So the only artist you can name and also like is Salvador Dali. You also admire some iconic record jackets. Insults are wasted on you.

There's a time and a place for your kind of windbaggery, and this wasn't it. I weep for an educational system that turns out guys like you: capable of nicely finished prose, but incapable of looking at a painting, except as an illustration, to be valued only for what you understand of facility. Not knowing the first thing about art, you feel entitled to throw out your silly opinions, because after all, this is just your comment on an article in an online magazine. So, you're snotty and excremental about the late Mr. Rauschenberg, but don't like being told so. You can be reude to him (what the hell, he's dead), but I can't be rude to you.

You decry the "emphasis on clever mediocrity" and profess to admire none but the all-time grand champion of clever mediocrity, Mr. Avida Dollars. I wish I could mention Hitler here, because his taste and yours show a certain overlap, but I can't and that's that. Instead, I'll refer you to the opinions of that other great critic, Ross Perot, whom you also resemble, rather.

i think warhol is more provocative, and johns' sanctification is unearned, but rauschenberg has charm.

for the snarkiest armchair critics let me say that you're sorta doing with words what artists often do; try to move away from something. some do it with intelligence, some through ignorance. moving away from something you chart a new course which is sometimes part of the artist's plan, sometimes not.

by judging only where a piece stands you miss much of the essence and glory of a work. if your unbalanced blogging seems a little too easy to do, you might be underinformed on the subject. cave paintings and rembrandt all have context.

naive first impressions can be valuable, but under the shadow of prejudged hostility they are a waste of time.