An Alternate Version

There is the great mythical mirage of America that I love. Expansive, sloppy, contradictory, rambling, rolling, overwhelming. It's spirit can be found in the pages of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Allen Ginsberg, Nelson Algren, Jack Kerouac...the music of Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Lucinda Williams, Willie Nelson...the art of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Georgia O'Keefe, Keith Haring, Robert Raushenberg, Jackson Pollock...the movies of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Woody Allen, Orson Welles, Frank Capra, John Ford, Nicholas Ray...the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans... the great and beautiful places of Big Sur, the BadLands, the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, Big Sky of Montana, the mountains and forests, rivers and streams...

Robert Hughes, an Australian art critic, speaking of Robert Raushenberg: "This...is the artist of the American Democracy, yearningly faithful to its clamor, its contradictions, its hope and its enormous demotic freedom..."