"'Art' 'Review'": Rauschenberg: Pretentious Failure Or Heroic Nutjob?

I just caught the show at the Met, Richard Rauschenberg: Combines, a series of hybrid paintings/sculptures. It's like stuff glued on stuff with paint. "Combines" not only describes the type of works but is also a good title because it vaguely evokes farm equipment.*

There were recurring objects. There were precipitous wooden planks, there were birds or parts of birds, shirt cuffs, and things dead or incarcerated. Mostly, there was junk.

So much junk, glued this way and that. It made me think my grandmother could have done it! What a way that could have been for her to pass the time! She was a depressed packrat living in Maine with the tv on all the time. She had loads and loads of junk, in the house, in the shed that she built out of the other junk. She could have glued it on canvas with paint to make herself feel better!

But I don't know if that's what was going on with Rauschenberg. I haven't bothered to research him yet, so I have no idea. And that is what is tricky about needing to know more about art before evaluating it. Because now it seems to matter. I didn't really like it much. It seemed to me to be awkwardly arranged, ungainly junk clusters. But someone else could see it entirely differently.

Verdict: If Rauschenberg was some hick doing it for therapy, I support him. If he was a pretentious fuck trying to do something new, he failed. Except now I'm thinking I like him just for making me think of my grandmother.

My date said that it seemed to be aiming for the macabre, but missed. He gets five points, for using "macabre"; Rauschenberg zero, for not achieving it.

*I don't know anything about visual art, and I kind of like it that way. I can invent reasons why it happened, and I can go with my gut. This in turn creates an art form blending ignorance with pedantry, which I'm told equals bullshitting.