Was Picasso a modern Midas who not only turned the trash of everyday life into the gold of Cubist collage but also gave new value to the work of the Old Masters? Or was he a monster counterfeiter who mercilessly raided the styles of others? In The Picasso Papers, Rosalind Krauss, one of the foremost theorists of modern art, suggests that the reason we still ask these questions is that modernism itself is a hall of mirrors in which "counterfeit" and "genuine" are two sides of the same condition.

Revealing Picasso's collage as a vertiginous play of voices, The Picasso Papers shows that no single voice is "authentic," no single voice sanctioned by its author. Picasso's pastiche of other artists is brilliantly brought into focus as the "sublimated" underbelly of Cubism itself, refashioned in the bright, clean style of the master's neo-classicism, a defense that is its own form of practicing the forbidden.