In May 1912, in his studio, Picasso did something that had no name yet: he glued a piece of oilcloth printed with chair caning onto a painting in progress. That work, Still Life with Chair Caning, was the first time in Western art history that someone ‘didn’t paint, only pasted.’

A few months later Braque cut newspaper and pasted it in (papier collé). Within a few years the Dadaists Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters turned the technique into a medium of its own — in his Hanover home Schwitters built a structure he called the Merzbau, the whole thing made of scavenged scraps, rubbish and tram tickets.

In 1950s America, Robert Rauschenberg combined painting, photographs, silkscreen and real objects (even a stuffed goat) into what he called ‘Combines.’ 1960s Pop Art inherited it; 1980s punk zine culture pushed it underground; today the IG carousel, the Pinterest moodboard, every ‘visual diary’ aesthetic — all are descendants of collage.

The core logic is a single line: put together things that don’t belong, and a third meaning appears. That logic became the meme, became sampling in music, became the underlying OS of all contemporary creation.