Google vs Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg died this week, are we told in the New York Times.

Who will be able to show us the world like him? The star of modern art has been known for "Canyon", "Monogram", "Bed". He reinvested the notion of “ready made” played by Duchamp, taking it to a new, more pictorial, dynamic. He extrapolated on the domain of Collages explored by Kurt Schwitters. He had this same sense of assemblage that made Joseph Cornell famous. But for Rauschenberg, no box: the objects have to flee out of the canvas. Moreover, there is simply no canvas: there are canvas, clothes, linen, cotton, wire, yarn, threads. And this is not a spider web that would be closed on itself, but a concrete object taken in the cobweb of existence. Painting is not a surface but becomes thick, covers the things and ties them up. Using newspapers articles, pasted on his works, he let significations play together on unrelated planes. In fact he takes our every day life to a raw material. He explained he could have been a photographer: in that case, he would have photographed the

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“inch by inch”. By coincidence, an American firm named Google has just begun to follow his desire to the letter: black cars equipped with rotating cameras drive through the great cities of the world in order to feed the data of “google streetview”.