Creativity Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg is needling the idea that “culture” lives on a pedestal while the stuff that carries it is disposable. The line works because it refuses to respect the boundary between art object and ordinary object. A newspaper you’re not reading becomes pure material: it can cover a table, pad a box, start a fire, line a trash can. In other words, its value isn’t inherent; it’s assigned by attention. That’s the quiet jab at moralism in the art world: people get precious about what counts as worthy, yet they’ll literally wrap garbage in yesterday’s seriousness without a second thought.

The subtext is classic Rauschenberg: meaning is not a sacred essence but a function of use, context, and proximity. He’s defending the aesthetic legitimacy of the lowly, the printed, the mass-produced-the same vernacular debris he folded into his Combines, where paint, fabric, photographs, and found objects collide. If the newspaper can be a wrapper, why can’t it be a surface? If it can touch waste, why can’t it touch “high” art?

There’s also a sly media critique: newsprint claims urgency and authority, but it ages instantly. Once it’s “not reading,” it’s downgraded to packaging. Rauschenberg turns that downgrade into an artistic principle, exposing how quickly we convert information into refuse-and how arbitrary our moral panic looks when it’s really just taste policing.