In the essay “Other Criteria,” the art critic and historian Leo Steinberg talks about the way that Rauschenberg “let the world in again.” He continues, “Not the world of the Renaissance man who looked for his weather clues out of the window; but the world of men who turn knobs to hear a taped message, ‘precipitation probability ten percent tonight,’ electronically transmitted from some windowless booth. Rauschenberg’s picture plane is for the consciousness immersed in the brain of the city.”
According to Steinberg, the “profoundest symbolic gesture” of letting “the world in again,” occurred when Rauschenberg took his bed (a surface for laying things upon) – and turned it vertical, thus, bringing his flatbed “picture plane” into what he describes as “the vertical posture of ‘art.’”
Post Internet art brings the network into the vertical posture of art.