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I went looking for a bit of Rauschenberg on YouTube this morning, and came across this quick four and a half minute piece on one of my favorites of his, the Erased de Kooning Drawing, from 1953.

I love this bit, about a minute and a half in…

“I kept making drawings myself and erasing them. And that just looked like an erased Rauschenberg. You know, it was nothing. So I figured out that it had to begin as art. So it was going to be a De Kooning. It was going to be an ‘important’ piece. You see how ridculously you have to think, in order to make this work?”

Michael Kimmelman’s obit in the New York Times also captures this great Rauschenberg quote:

“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”