I posted this yesterday, but today I realize more clearly what I liked about it: Rauschenberg’s being wacky. Wackiness used to be legit; more than that, it reigned supreme — slapstick, physical (and facial) comedy, goofy skits, comic routines and comical costumes, kooky props, sound gags like gawooga horns, and all the rest. We seem to have lost that at some point: everyone and everything is all about “complicity” these days, the tacit implication being that innocence is somehow sus by definition. A few millennia or so ago, the ancient Greeks recognized that tragedy and comedy were the two aspects of the world. If that were still true (a girl can dream, can’t she?!), Lenny Bruce’s career trajectory would mark a civilizational turning point — the moment when the tragic finally consumed the comic. Phooey.