Freshly dead, Robert Rauschenberg still rings alarm bells for reactionaries, who view him as a symbol of everything that is beyond their control. For them, he was a trash collector who fell down on the job by scattering it instead of packing it away. (here and here.)

They wouldn't attack if he didn't matter. In a sense, their words are the greatest tribute, but they're still depressing to read about an artist who redeemed the day to day, not in ideas but in things.

That's why it was such as pleasure to read Newsweek today, where Peter Plagens logged in at just the right time, cleaning off the contrarian slime trail.

Here's Plagens:

By any and all of the three main ways of measuring an artist's greatness--what the work looks like, its situation in art history, and the influence on younger artists--Robert Rauschenberg is at the top of the heap. Rauschenberg, who died May 12 at the age of 82, made paintings and sculpture (and practically everything in between) that captured the gritty, cacophonic essence of industrialized urban life and, more important, found the overlooked beauty in it. A quilt-covered mattress, a stuffed goat and a tire, a bucket, newspaper photographs of JFK and an astronaut on the moon, faded wallpaper, a screen door, and cardboard boxes--these were the raw materials of a Rauschenberg artwork. They were tubes of paint and brushes to Rauschenberg (he used those, too), and with them he created some of the most electrifyingly and strangely familiar works of art of the last 60 years.

Exactly.