RIP Rauschenberg


From the NY Times obituary (which itself appears to be a mix and match of off-the-shelf and recent updates):

The process -- an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things -- was always what mattered most to him. "Screwing things up is a virtue," he said when he was 74. "Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea."

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, "to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art."

He "keeps asking the question -- and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art," Tworkov said, "and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists."