Robt. Rauschenberg—Nihil nisi bonum…
Jack Shafer at Slate wanders through the Rauchenberg obits and finds that few had anything but good to say about the influential painter’s careeer.
The solemn tributes to Robert Rauschenberg in today’s newspapers prove that you’re more likely to encounter an independent mind operating in the sports pages than the arts section. Hoisting his reputation high and escorting it into paradise, critics from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal write as if toeing the correct line handed down by some cultural commissar.
To the Journal’s Barbara Rose, he’s “the biggest innovator in art after Jackson Pollock.” The Los Angeles Times‘ Christopher Knight regards Rauschenberg (along with collaborator Jasper Johns) as “the most important American artist to emerge into prominence in the 1950s.” The Chicago Tribune’s Alan G. Artner writes that Rauschenberg “was one of the most influential artists in the second half of the 20th Century.” The New York Times‘ Michael Kimmelman salutes the artist for having “time and again reshaped art in the 20th century” and for giving “new meaning to sculpture.” Even mild dissenter Blake Gopnik of the Post, who no longer likes Rauschenberg’s Combines as much as he once did, acknowledges the man as a “master” and the maker of “some of the most influential art of the past 50 years.”
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Yeah, some discussion of his deliberate controversy — and the tiresome elevation of mere provocation as a virtue in itself in his generation of artists — would have been nice. But Shafer writes as though he doesn’t understand the function of an obituary. Newspaper obits are rarely warts-and-all life examinations, except for those whose lives were mostly warts. Plus, he lived to a good old age and acquired the elder statesman patina. If Shafer’s disgusted by the whitewashing of Rauschenberg’s provocations, he must have been apoplectic at the obits Leni Riefenstahl received.
Anyway, there’ll be plenty of opportunity for full assessment of Rauschenberg’s career. It’s human nature to remember the dead for their best features at the time of death. Calling it “slobbering over the corpse” seems to me silly, not to mention a bit spittle-flecked.
As for more “independent minds” operating in the Sports section, that’s true, if by “independent” one means “not much concerned with objectivity”; there are more independent minds, and less genuine journalism, in the sports section than any other newspaper section, and if you like sports as I do, trying to follow it in the newspapers through the haze of opinion and provocation and received ideas that substitutes for observation and analysis is an eternal frustration. If Barry Bonds dropped dead tomorrow, the sports section would certainly give Shafer the kind of obituary he desires, and then some; but it would be just as incomplete and more untruthful than the Rauschenberg notices.
Okay, the last line is unfair; Shafer no doubt doesn’t want character-assassination obituaries, either.
I take your point, but there’s definitely a groupthink going on with him. Giveaway: If nothing else there should have been one clearly delineated graf somewhere in the obit. “Not everyone bought into what Rauschenberg was doing; a tattoo of criticism from debunkers has always accompanied his career….”
That’s true.
I think that age, and distance from controversy, probably plays a large part in how much balance goes in the obit.
By the way, I think you might enjoy Phil Davison’s obit of Robert Vesco in the Financial Times. It begins:
“Of all the adjectives used to describe him, Robert Vesco – who has died at 72 – was happiest with “financier”. For the son of an Italian immigrant carworker in Detroit, the word had an exotic ring and he did not like to be called a crook, conman, fugitive, mobster, swindler or international drug dealer.”