Robert Rauschenberg (b.1925) is one of those artists who has made an astonishingly successful career out of the rehashing of a single idea. Rauschenberg’s idea – cleverly or subversively combining a popular-culture “this” with an established-art-world “that” – never seems to wear on his champions. It only appears to make them love him more. Perhaps, as one of America’s anti-art founding fathers, Mr. Rauschenberg has established, anti-establishment, cult appeal; or perhaps there is something nostalgic in the admiration of his aging, Dada-inspired-Pop-Art status.

Mr. Rauschenberg, who has never really been a painter in the traditional sense, is a fastidious tinkerer who finesses images. He is not an artist who is interested in metaphor; in fact, we are always aware that he does not necessarily even care for art – that, although he has spent his life making pictures, he could just as well leave it as take it. The artist’s language does not interest Mr. Rauschenberg: He uses repetition as a game, not as music and rhythm; he uses color for its verbal rather than visual significance; he uses symbols, signs, and shapes more for irony than as explorations of their visual power, which he often downplays. It is the attitude of an artist who does not really care.

Because they are carried not by aesthetics but by his circa-1950 “idea,” Mr. Rauschenberg’s artworks, both old and new, seem dated. They speak more about the time of post-Abstract Expressionist reactions than they do about anything else. Regardless of its incorporation of contemporary things and images, its innovations in printmaking or supposed combining of painting and sculpture, its perceived marriage of highbrow and lowbrow taste, Mr. Rauschenberg’s art cannot transcend the period of its genesis. It is the long-in-the-tooth equivalent of an old hippie who still wears tie-dye, smells of hash and patchouli oil, and says things like: “Where it’s at, man.”

And Mr. Rauschenberg’s artworks become more withered, brittle, colorless, dirty, and has-been with age – especially the messy, do-little “Combine Paintings,” which are collaged together with oil paint, an old tire, leather, and an electric fixture (“First Landing Jump,” 1961); oil paint, an old tire, and a stuffed goat (“Monogram,” 1955-9); or oil paint, a pillow, quilt, and sheet (“Bed,” 1955).

I would have thought that we had seen enough over the years of Mr. Rauschenberg, who has been celebrated by, and is in the collection of, nearly every major museum in the United States and abroad. Apparently not. Six new shows of his work will open during the next 15 months at venues in Miami, Los Angeles, Nice, and Paris, France, Stockholm, and New York.

The onslaught began last week in Chelsea at PaceWildenstein, with a version of the show “Scenarios,” which consists of some of Mr. Rauschenberg’s recent works, 12 identically sized diptychs (each over 7 feet tall and 10 feet wide) in pigment transfers on polylaminate. It will not end until 2006, when a retrospective of approximately 75 “Combines” from the 1950s and 1960s, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In between, a show of collaborative works Mr. Rauschenberg made with Darryl Pottorf will be at UAM, a show of Mr. Rauschenberg’s fine-art posters will be at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mr. Rauschenberg will be awarded the International Prize “Julio Gonzalez” for lifetime work by the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, and the Musee d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, France, will mount a show of Mr. Rauschenberg’s work

And, oh yes, there is an new edition of the Abrams monograph “Rauschenberg: Art and Life Revised and Updated Edition” by Mary Lynn Kotz.

The ongoing theme of the works in PaceWildenstein’s show “Scenarios” appears to be a vague sense of place. Each is sparsely collaged together out of opaque or transparent photographs, blown up or scaled down, scattered loosely within a grid on a sterile white ground. Each is based very freely on visual and verbal puns and, seemingly, on a location: sometimes familiar, sometimes unfamiliar (though clearly recognizable as city or country), and often in America.

The pictures are tastefully vague, tongue-in-cheek, anti-art artworks that say “Rauschenberg!” Whatever else they may be capable of saying is stifled by their Rauschenbergness. Easily recognizable as signature works by the artist, they are perfect status symbols for impersonal but expensive, tastefully vague home or corporate art collections in need of a little tongue-in-cheek, anti-art cachet.

Mr. Rauschenberg can mist grays towards green or violet. He can give you just enough of scraped-up detail to suggest two or three different objects in a particular form. He can also depersonalize a house and personify a piece of heavy construction equipment so that they cancel each other out. And he loves to “combine” images in indistinct, thought-provoking ways.

In “Party Line” (2003), a British phone booth door becomes a window through which we see the back of an SUV. The booth’s wires are attached to a sign with two arrows, reading up and down, that suggest traffic goes both ways. The sign is above the severed door of a New York City cab, which becomes a frame, or window within a window.

In “Playhouse”(2003),we see various rundown shacks, huge orange cones, beer kegs, a manhole marked “water,” and a sign, from 1940, on a patch of grass in Virginia Beach, Va., that reads: “No Dogs or Sailors Allowed on Grass.”

In “Seasonal House” (2004), a bird of prey lands on a nest merged with a van, which is hand-painted with an advertisement for the “Hip Hop” soul food restaurant; the nest is juxtaposed with an old truck, perched on a bed of grass and decorated with a sign for organic strawberries. The picture is dominated with abandoned homes that resemble birdhouses and at the bottom is a car, which is painted with goofy chickens.

“Nomads Welcome” (2002) gives us, among other things, a tire swing floating over its own lonely, doughnut shaped shadow and a graffiti-covered “No Parking” sign. There is also a barrel resting on its side on two tires and an old camper painted with the words “Happy Camping! Welcome.” Both the barrel and the camper, when compared, resemble the forms of a buffalo, seen in its framed picture. In “Casting” (2004), the artist offers us various signs that, spaced throughout the picture, begin to read like a Dadaist poem: “Tickets Tickets” “Now Hiring” “Car Wash” “Fresh Meat” “Depth Charge” “Ice.”

Mr. Rauschenberg’s ambivalent “Scenarios,” like most of his work throughout his career, are cool, bleak, faceless, and mildly professional, as suggestive as they are noncommittal; as deadpan as they are decorative, as conformist as they are nonconformist. They continue to follow the standard Rauschenberg path of least resistance, maintaining a dutifully artistic yet down-with-art stance.

Until February 12 (534 West 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-929-7001). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices.