Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

Awe is doing double duty here: it reads as genuine gratitude, but it also functions as a self-positioning move from an artist who would soon upend what “painting” could be. Rauschenberg casts himself as the newcomer, wide-eyed in New York, which quietly establishes the city as a pressure cooker of legitimacy. If you were “new in New York,” the implication goes, you were arriving at the center of the art world’s weather system: Abstract Expressionism’s heroic scale, its swaggering seriousness, its insiders and gatekeepers.

The quote’s casualness (“I mean,” “just unbelievable”) matters. Rauschenberg isn’t giving us a manifesto; he’s letting enthusiasm sound unguarded. That tone softens what might otherwise read as rivalry. He acknowledges the painters first, placing deference ahead of differentiation. The subtext is strategic humility: a way to honor the dominant language before you start speaking in dialects that make the old language feel insufficient.

Context sharpens the irony. Rauschenberg’s early years in New York coincided with a moment when “painting” was being treated like a moral test: authenticity, gesture, purity. He’s describing a scene he revered, yet his own practice would soon fold the street into the studio, staple objects onto canvases, treat images as cluttered information rather than transcendent proof of self. “Unbelievable” can be read as praise, but also as a signal that the myth of painting was already becoming theatrical - so intense it tipped into something you could only believe from the outside, right before you decided to break it.