New York has always been a city of images. From the iconic skyline to the endless stream of photos on Instagram, what we see of the city often stands apart from what it truly is. In our digital age, this divide has only deepened. Much of New York today is curated and consumed as surface - restaurants staged for TikTok, neighborhoods branded like products, moments captured and filtered rather than lived. The regular sharing of photos in DUMBO of the Manhattan Bridge framed by old warehouses and a cobblestone street exemplifies this trend.
This present, mediated, and distorted version of New York came to mind as I walked through the Museum of the City of New York’s new exhibition, Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World. The show celebrates one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century, best known for collapsing the boundaries between art and everyday life. Rauschenberg famously sought to bring the “real world” into his work, incorporating humble materials, discarded objects, and photographs into his paintings and sculptures.
The exhibition, part of the Rauschenberg Centennial, is organized in three sections: Early Photographs, In + Out City Limits, and Photography in Painting. The museum describes Rauschenberg’s vision as one of capturing “the signs and symbols of human culture, even in humble or discarded remnants of the city.” It is an evocative framing and a revealing one.
For all the talk of “the real world,” what struck me most was its absence. Rauschenberg’s New York is a city of surfaces. His camera captures objects and patterns with undeniable skill, but the people who inhabit those spaces are missing. In photograph after photograph, we see signs but not speech, architecture but not civic purpose, remnants but not renewal.
Fragments Without Wholes
The first section of the show features Rauschenberg’s early experiments as a student at Black Mountain College, where he explored framing, light and shadow, and the flattening of the picture plane.” These images are witty and visually striking.
One particularly memorable photograph captures a classical statue of Venus surrounded by discount-store signage, kitsch figurines, and a small sign reading “SALE.” The juxtaposition of timeless beauty with disposable consumer culture is funny, biting, and clever. Another image focuses on a pile of framed paintings stacked haphazardly in a shop window, reducing them to shapes and reflections rather than works of art.
These photographs anticipate the irony-saturated world we live in now, where the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, collide endlessly online. Rauschenberg saw decades before Instagram how easily culture could be fragmented and remixed.
But this very strength is also a limitation. These early works excel at noticing surfaces, yet they offer little sense of what lies beneath. They revel in ambiguity without guiding us toward understanding. The viewer is left to appreciate the clash of images, but not the lives and communities those images represent.
The Urban Survey
The exhibition’s centerpiece, In + Out City Limits, extends this approach to the entire city. Created between 1979 and 1981, the series documents the physical remnants of New York at a time of profound upheaval. These photographs are filled with weathered storefronts, broken signage, and architectural fragments.
One image depicts the façade of a diner. Its neon sign is half-broken, the letters dark, while shuttered metal grates seal off the entrance. Below, trash bags are piled neatly on the curb. The composition is beautiful in its starkness; the textures of brick, metal, and plastic rendered almost abstract.
Another photograph zooms in on the stately columns of a civic building near Astor Place. The image emphasizes symmetry and shadow, stripping away context until the institution becomes pure pattern.
These works are striking, but they are also unsettling. They document a city in decline without showing the people living through it. We do not meet the workers who once staffed that diner, the congregants who gathered in that civic hall, or the neighborhood residents navigating decay and renewal. The photographs turn lived experience into aesthetic object.
This aestheticization of decline mirrors a broader cultural mood. In late-1970s New York, economic crisis and social unrest were visible on every block. By focusing on remnants rather than relationships, Rauschenberg recorded the city’s struggles but offered no vision for its renewal.
From Art to Algorithm
The final section of the exhibition shows how Rauschenberg combined his photographs with painting and other media, creating complex, layered works. By reversing, resizing, and juxtaposing images, he demonstrated the mutability of meaning itself. A single photograph could be endlessly recontextualized and transformed.
In the 1960s and 1970s, this was radical. Today, it feels prophetic. We now live in a world where every image can be manipulated, cropped, filtered, and recirculated at lightning speed. What was once avant-garde has become our daily experience.
Our phones are full of Rauschenbergian collages: fragments of news, entertainment, advertising, and personal updates competing for attention. This endless remixing has consequences. When everything is provisional and ironic, it becomes harder to sustain shared narratives. Civic life depends on more than fragments. It requires institutions, rituals, and ideals that endure.
This is where Rauschenberg’s vision, for all its brilliance, falters. By privileging surface over substance, his art reflects a cultural tendency to treat cities and the people within them as aesthetic material rather than moral and civic realities.
The Civic Counterpoint
Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist and urbanist, has written in Triumph of the City that the strength that comes from human interaction is the very magic of cities. My own work has echoed and confirmed this sentiment finding that cities thrive when they are built on dense networks of institutions: families, faith communities, schools, local businesses, civic associations. These are the places where trust is built and responsibility learned.
When these institutions are weak, cities become brittle. The physical landscape may remain, but the human connections that give it meaning erode. A diner is not just a building; it is a gathering place. A civic hall is not merely columns and stone; it is a stage for collective decision-making and celebration.
Rauschenberg’s photographs show us what happens when those connections fray. His images are full of remnants and signs, but the communities they once served are absent. This is not just an artistic choice. It is a reflection of a real civic crisis; a crisis that continues today.
New York’s Present Tense
These questions are not abstract. In New York today, battles over public space are really battles over belonging. Debates about housing policy, transit, and policing are at their core debates about how we share the city and how we see one another.
Walk through neighborhoods from Queens to the Bronx and you’ll see scenes that could be straight out of In + Out City Limits: vacant storefronts, faded signage, striking juxtapositions of old and new. These surfaces tell part of the story. But the real challenge lies in the invisible: the strength or weakness of the relationships beneath them.
Consider the fight over a local park. To some, it is simply a space to be programmed or redeveloped. To others, it is a living institution, shaped by years of block parties, youth sports, and informal gatherings. The policy debate is about zoning and funding. The civic debate is about belonging and meaning.
Rauschenberg’s art helps us see the fragments. Our task is to connect them into a whole.
A Call to Rebuild
The exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York is a fitting tribute to Rauschenberg’s creativity and influence. But it is also, unintentionally, a mirror of our current predicament. We live amid surfaces - online and offline - that can dazzle but also distract.
If we are to renew our cities, we must move beyond surfaces. That means investing not only in infrastructure and development but in the relationships and institutions that make physical spaces matter. It means strengthening families, supporting local businesses, empowering community organizations, and fostering civic education.
Rauschenberg captured the fragments of a city. It is up to us to assemble them into a living whole. A thriving New York does not need more curated images. It needs the messy, vital work of neighbors meeting, building, and belonging.
As I left the exhibition and stepped back into the streets, I saw many of the same elements Rauschenberg photographed decades ago: broken signs, fading paint, architectural details caught in late afternoon light. But I also saw people: families walking home from school, small business owners sweeping sidewalks, friends gathered on stoops.
The real world is not just what we see. It is what we build, together
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.
Photo: New York City; Robert Rauschenberg 1981 Gelatin silver print, © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
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