ABSTRACT
The case of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed is comparatively simple, though few works of art have caused so much exasperation. A target is made up of concentric circles, and Jasper Johns was far too astute an observer of modern art not to know that concentric circles had been a favorite motif with abstract painters since the days of Robert Delaunay and the youthful Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Thomas B. Hess, that the only art worth talking about was “difficult, serious, remote, aristocratic” and those who believed that, no matter where the action was, art should get a piece of it. Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; in the same way, people learned from Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein that they had lived amidst art all their lives and never known it. Pop art could also operate with metamorphic effect upon objects of current use that would not at other times have been the material of art.
