Creativity Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg is swatting away a favorite modern alibi: the idea that someone else, somewhere else, is in charge of the mess. The line is plainspoken, almost stubbornly unpoetic, and that’s the point. Coming from an artist who built meaning out of other people’s images, discarded materials, and the noisy surface of American life, it reads like a refusal to let “systems” become a hiding place for personal passivity. No one has been “given permission” to outsource responsibility. Not the politician, not the critic, not the artist.

The phrasing matters. He doesn’t say people shouldn’t blame; he says they haven’t been authorized to. That bureaucratic word choice needles the audience into noticing how blame often comes dressed up as procedure: as if moral accountability is something granted by committee. Rauschenberg cuts through that with a kind of pragmatic ethics, one that matches his work’s anti-heroic stance. His Combines and later screen prints don’t preach; they assemble. They insist you look at what’s already here and admit you’re implicated in it.

Contextually, this sits neatly in the postwar era’s tug-of-war between the grand, self-mythologizing artist (Abstract Expressionism’s lone genius) and the cooler, more entangled sensibility that follows. Rauschenberg’s art collapses the distance between “high” culture and the street; his statement collapses the distance between observer and participant. The subtext is a warning to fellow artists especially: critique is not a moral exemption. If you’re going to make work out of the world, you don’t get to pretend the world is someone else’s problem.