collage
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.
Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut-up.
“The Art of Fiction No. 36,” The Paris Review, interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker, Fall 1965.