I’ve spent the past week trying to make sense of Robert Rauschenberg. It wasn’t on my list of year-end projects, but I recently found myself looking at the artist’s work for the first time in a while on the very cold and windy upper stretches of Fifth Avenue. A few weeks earlier, one of the most perceptive and on-trend art advisors I know had posted images from the Museum of the City of New York’s show of Rauschenberg’s photography, and from a special exhibition at the Guggenheim drawn from the museum’s own collection. I had only been vaguely aware that it was the centennial of Rauschenberg’s birth in Port Arthur, Texas—the same town that gave us Janis Joplin 18 years later.