It is comforting to remember, given the depressing results of
postmodernism’s refusal to make distinctions between the detritus of
popular culture and anything else, that part of what made Modernist
art modern—and radical—in the first place was its deliberate
embrace of materials without art-historical precedent and sources of
inspiration remote from the time-honored subject matter of Western
art. Modernists at the beginning of this century explored the
possibilities of everything from newspaper to scrap metal, from the
debris on café tables to the ritual objects of Africa, seizing them
as both raw materials and points of departure that permitted or
provoked unprecedented formal inventions.

Adopting “non-art” materials and prototypes was obviously a
self-conscious declaration of independence from tradition. Part of
African sculpture’s fascination for Picasso, for example, was its
distance from the Greco-Roman aesthetic heritage that he had been
trained to revere. Its attraction was its exoticism, its
“primitivism”—in the sense of springing from a culture apparently
disconnected from European bourgeois values—transgressive
qualities reinforced by the fact that seeing African sculpture and
masks in any quantity in 1906 Paris required a visit not to the
sacrosanct Louvre but to the ethnographic museum. Of course, the
games Picasso played with words and fragments of words visible on
the pasted papers of his collages were not accidents; neither were
the absorbing questions about the meaning of reality he raised by
including real ball fringe or absinthe spoons in his constructions.
But what really seems to have engaged him was the