A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Let me mention, however, that we live in the age of the "genuine fake" because we understand for the first time the art process and the making process as never before, so that Picasso said long ago: "I always paint fakes". The function of art in relating us to ourselves and to our world and in freeing us from the adaptive or robot role, has changed entirely in the electric time. The art product as such becomes relatively insignificant compared to the process of making and of participation in that making.
Letter to P.E. Trudeau, March 26, 1974, in Letters (1987), p 495
Year: 1974
↪ Also at #2257
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan