Creativity Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg’s New York isn’t the postcard city of icons and skylines; it’s a working medium, a perpetual studio where the raw materials keep turning up uninvited. “Unexpected quality around every corner” reads like a love letter to contingency: the busted sign, the overheard argument, the chunk of street detritus that becomes a collage element or a conceptual trigger. Coming from an artist who built entire aesthetics out of chance encounters and found objects, the line doubles as a credo. Surprise isn’t just pleasant; it’s productive.

The subtext is a quiet defense of urban density as an engine of cross-pollination. New York’s “every corner” suggests not only abundance but proximity: different classes, languages, industries, and art scenes rubbing up against each other, generating friction and, for Rauschenberg, possibility. It also hints at the city as a place where authorship loosens. The environment collaborates, interrupts, competes. You don’t fully control what you make because you don’t fully control what you notice.

Context matters: Rauschenberg came up in the postwar New York art world, when the city was aggressively redefining itself as the capital of modern art and when the street felt closer to the studio than the museum did. Calling this quality “quite extraordinary” sounds modest, but it’s a pointed valuation. He’s praising New York not for glamour but for its capacity to keep artists from getting comfortable - to keep perception alert, and art, by extension, alive.