Maggie's Farm

That Rauschenberg (the person) was a friendly guy and easy to talk to says nothing about the value to the viewer of his paintings. Me, I tend to ignore art like this because it doesn't hold my interest more than momentarily.

Human beings have a hardwired propensity to look for patterns and meaning among the things in the world around them. That includes paintings, from shapeless daubs of color to finely rendered detailed views of the world in front of us. That built-in search for meaning probably leads us to attribute more to paintings like this than they deserve.

What holds my eye longer is painting that elicits — provokes? — an emotion that intrigues me. I can't easily define how that happens, but when art produces it I spend more time on it.

But as all images do — even 3D ones like sculpture — eventually they become familiar and lose much of the capacity to produce emotion. I suppose a measure of the quality of art for each individual lies in how long and how strong the emotion is.

Rauschenberg's work doesn't do much for me because it strikes me as too contrived and too much within a particular style of painting. He got a good career from that style, but it does little for me. For more on the career aspects, see Tom Wolfe's fascinating book The Painted Word.