Before shutting off the episode in disgust, I was dismayed (not to say astounded) by the ignorance each of the gabbers displayed in the discussion of Robert Rauschenberg on the May 21 Culture Gabfest. The moronic discussion of Erased de Kooning was truly worthy of a class of 8th-graders in Des Moines. Pulling tired old chestnuts like Tom Wolfe's notoriously philistine Painted Word out of the crypt, or quoting with approval Jed Perl, who so appealingly wears the mental bow tie of his antedeluvian mentor Hilton Kramer (the Capt. Peter "Wrong Way" Peachfuzz of art criticism) is the laziest, most shallow sort of intellectual dishonesty.

Rauschenberg was a hugely uneven artist, as many of his admirers would agree; but when he was on, as in the Combines of the mid-1950s through early 1960s surveyed in a very beautiful show at the Met in the winter of 2005-6, he was like a highwire artist who could not take a false step. If you can't see that, you should not be wasting listeners' time pretending to be culture critics. My suggestion to all of you, and your benighted colleague Jack Shafer, is stop reading and start looking.