fragment
The collage technique, that art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, is the most important innovation in the art of this century. Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, or recognized.
Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2006), 19.
It may be that the incomplete story, the particle, the fragment, is now the preferred unit of information for our culture, and lack of place is more useful for presenting these fragments than to fix them into sentences or grids.
“Reading Outside the Grid: Designers and Society,” in Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, edited by Michael Bierut (New York: Allworth Press, 1994), 95.