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Collage for Our Times
There’s a worthwhile story in the New York Times about the invention of collage, that art form many of us experience in grade school that involves safety scissors that don’t really cut and glue that seems to get everywhere but on the object in question. Ah! Happy days!
What’s cool about Collage is not that it was invented over 100 years ago by the Cubist innovators Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso but what it has to say about the times we live in. These days, when serious people, or at least people with serious jobs, hold forth on space-based lasers, bankrolled by prominent Jewish families, sparking forest fires and…yada, yada, you get it — there’s a dearth of seriousness from the people who are supposed to have a claim on being the adults in the room. Some people actually believe this stuff and why not? They’ve become unmoored from reality due to a decade of adversity.
Back in Cubist days, Paris society was fragmented too. People hung out in cafes, reading dime store novels, drinking cheap but good wine, espresso, and absinthe, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, and importantly reading lots of newspapers. The article alludes to multiple newspapers in Paris each with well north of one million copies printed daily. So there was fiction, poetry, news, and especially gossip in abundance and it wasn’t always easy to tell one from another. Just like today.
