A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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“Perfect! Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical! Epigrammatic! With this even, even, even voice, this utter scholarly aplomb-with these pronouncements-"Art is always one technology behind. The content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age"- with all this Nietzschean certitude McLuhan has become an intellectual star of the West. He is a word-of-mouth celebrity.”
Tom Wolfe
“The New Life Out There”, in The New York Herald Tribune (1965), p 7
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Art, Artists
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Marshall McLuhan
"Agnew Agonistes", in The McLuhan Dew-Line Newsletter, vol 2, no. 4 ,January-February (1970)
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Art, Artists
The arts both as storehouse of achieved values and as the antennae of new awareness and discovery make possible both a unified and an inclusive human consciousness in which there is easy commerce between old and new, between assured success and tentative inquiry and experiment.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951) p 87
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Consciousness
Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feedforward. They have no identities. They are probes.
Culture is Our Business, (1970), p 44
Year: 1970
Artists in various fields are always the first to discvover how to enable one medium to use or release the power of another. In a simpler form, it is the technique employed by Charles Boyer in his kind of French-English blend of urbane, throaty delirium.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 54
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Media Reprocess Media
Away with the role of art as shield of vision in which to view and slay the gangrenous monster of Good Taste!
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 172
Year: 1970
Technological art takes the whole earth and its population as its material, not as its form.
“Media Log,” 1954, Explorations 2, p 95
Year: 1954
The world of science has become quite self-conscious about the play element in its endless experiments with models of situations otherwise unobservable. Management training centers have long used games as a means of developing new business perception. John Kenneth Galbraith argues that business must now study art, for the artist makes models of problems and situations that have not yet emerged in the larger matrix of society, giving the artistically perceptive businessman a decade of leeway in his planning.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 243
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Management
Drawn to McLuhan #6
The artist, says W. Lewis, is always writing a history of the future because he alone is aware of the nature of the present. Knowledge of this fact is now needed for human survival. The ability of the artist to sidestep the bully blow of new technology of any age, and to parry such violence with full awareness, is age-old.
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 65
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Mastering Technology
New art is sensory violence on the frontiers of experience.
Culture is our business, (1970), p 186
Year: 1970
For if all art is a contrived trap for the attention, all art and all language are techniques for looking at one situation through another one.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 121 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 307, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 131, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Year: 1953
Because inherent in the artist’s creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change. It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it. But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the message–that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media,” By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 56, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), pp 237-238
Year: 1969
(In reference to the hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch)
Today it is the iconic world that has become the container for the old visual space, creating not dissimilar nightmarishness in our world.
“New Media and the Arts”, (1964), p 241
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Anxieties Caused By Change
If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.
Letter to Wilfred Watson, October 6 1965, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 325; later quoted in "Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, January 1, (1981)
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Anxieties Caused By Change
The printed book had encouraged artists to reduce all forms of expression as much as possible to the single descriptive and narrative plane of the printed word. The advent of electric media released art from this straitjacket at once, creating the world of Paul Klee, Picasso, Braque, Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers, and James Joyce.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 54
Year: 1964
The task of art is to correct the bias of technological media.
“General introduction to charts”, NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, 1960, p 22
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Anxieties Caused By Change
The art object is replaced by participation in the art process. This is the essential meaning of electric circuitry and responsive environments. The artist leaves the Ivory Tower for the Control Tower, and abandons the shaping of art objects in order to program the environment itself as a work of art.
“The Emperor's Old Clothes” (1966), in McLuhan Unbound (2017), p 14
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Anxieties Caused By Change
Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 77
Year: 1970
Chapters:
Anxieties Caused By Change | Dialogue
The literary artist is a person who seeks to arrange it in forms which will release that power
“The concept of space in art”, in Garbage Apocalypse (1971), p 23
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Anxieties Caused By Change
The great speed-up of transactions creates a huge depression, or drop-out of human values. Radio did this in the 20’s and TV in the 60’s. When Henri Bergson was asked how could you tell if the speed of all things was doubled, he answered: “I could tell by the impoverishment of my consciousness.” What applies to the complex system of human awareness equally concerns the corporate life. The overall speed of transactions creates vast depression of body and spirit alike.
“Where It’s At, Where It’s Going,” unpublished 1969 essay, typescript, p 1
Year: 1969
The poets and painters and musicians of the later nineteenth century all insist on a sort of metaphysical melancholy as latent in the great industrial world of the metropolis. The Pierrot figure is as crucial in the poetry of Laforgue as it is in the art of Picasso or the music of Satie. Is not the mechanical at its best a remarkable approximation to the organic?
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 278
Year: 1964
What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.
Letter to John Culkin, September 17, 1964” in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 309
Year: 1964
The futurists, the cubists, the Vorticists, and others accepted the mechanical as an art form. Today, Pop art, derived from the old environment of advertising technology, appears as an art form.
“New Media and the Arts”, in Society Magazine, Volume 3, No.2, September 1964, p.239
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Cubism | Extension Theory
The principle of new technology as an archetypal environment that moulds new art forms out of the antecedent technologies is a principle that applies to all the arts and sciences, to architecture as much as to music, or mathematics.
“New Media and the Arts”, in Society Magazine, Volume 3, No.2, September, 1964, p.242
Year: 1964
It is one of the ironies of the electronic age that the businessman must become alert and highly trained in the world of the arts. It is one of the mysteries of cybernation that it is forever challenged by the need to simulate consciousness.”
“Cybernetics and Human Culture,” (1964), in Understanding Me (2003), p 49
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Management
In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 99
Year: 1988
All human artifacts are human utterances, or outerings, and as such they are linguistic and rhetorical entities.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 128
Year: 1988
The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 48
Year: 1988
The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' had tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 47
Year: 1988
Scientists make their discoveries as ‘artists,’ not specialists. Such scientists construct experiments as “works of art” to probe the environment.
Media and Formal Cause with Eric McLuhan, (2011), p 55
Year: 2011
Chapter:
Science
The basic criterion for any kind of human excellence is simply how heavy a demand it makes on the intelligence. How inclusive a consciousness does it focus?
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 152
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Consciousness
Like Joyce, Paul Klee presents us with a minute history of the future. Perhaps this is only to say that any artist lives and works with the unlived possibilities of his time. He is the point of maximum awareness.
“Review of Paul Klee, by Carola Giedion-Welcker”, in Shenandoah, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring, (1953), p 77
Year: 1953
As mime, the artist cannot be the prudent and decorous Ulysses, but appears as a sham. As sham and mime he undertakes not the ethical quest but the quest of the great fool. He must become all things in order to reveal all. And to be all he must empty himself... the artist cannot properly speak with his own voice.
“James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial” Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, Vol. 28, No 1, (1953), in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 31-32
Year: 1953
Chapter:
Playfulness
The function of new art is to reorganize perception and impulse. So that an art that does not disturb and annoy, at first, is meaningless.
“A Victorian Proto-Martyr of the Arts.” Review of A Hopkins Reader, ed., John Pick], in Commonweal, Vol. 58, No. 13,July 3, (1953), 326-327
Year: 1953
As a vacuum tube is used to shape and control vast reservoirs of electric power, the artist can manipulate the low current of casual words, rhythms, and resonances to evoke the primal harmonies of existence or to recall the dead. But the price he must pay is total self-abnegation.
"Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954), p 45, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 11-12.
Year: 1954
All art is in a sense magical in that it produces a change or metamorphosis in the spectator. It refashions his experience.
“Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut, (1954),p 59, reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 164
Year: 1954
In this angelic view the business of art has nothing to do with the analogy of cognition nor with our miraculous power to incarnate the external world. It is a means rather to lift us out of our human condition and to restore us to the divine world from which we fell at birth. In this view the artist becomes one with the Nietzschean superman, the transvaluer of values. Reality is not to be trusted but to be remade by social engineers.
“Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut,(1954),p 64, reprinted in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 171
Year: 1954
All the new media, including the press, are art forms that have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.
“Media Log”, In Explorations 4, (1955), p 54
Year: 1955
The artist is the historian of the future because he uses the unnoticed possibilities of the present.
“Third Program in the Human Age”, in Explorations 8, October (1957); Issue later reprinted as Verbi-Voco-Visual, (1967), p 17
Year: 1957
And may it not be that the new importance that is now accorded to the arts, both in education and in industry, is owing to our awakened sense of the role of art and artists in raising subliminal and non-verbal factors of experience to the level of conscious articulation?
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003), p 9
Year: 1959
…since printing it has been the poets and painters who have explored and predicted the various possibilities of print, of prints, of press, of telegraph, of photograph, movie, radio and television. In recent decades the arrival of several new media had led to prodigious experimentation in the arts. But, at present, the artists have yielded to the media themselves. Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. That is to say, that whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development.
NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June 1960, p i
Year: 1960
For the past century, the artist has been our only navigator in social and political terms. The models which he makes are not wishful dreams that money can buy, but urgent factual instructions of the means of avoiding disaster. Top industry understands this, a little bit today. Artists move onward and upward in the commercial field through the departments of industrial and package design. In the field of operations research, the artist accepts the priority which is not his reward, but his responsibility.
The New Criticism and the New Media, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 4
Year: 1960
Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man , (1962), p 77
Year: 1962
Cezanne paints objects as if he were holding them in his hand.
“Technology Kills Democracy, McLuhan Tells Exchangers”, in The Varsity (U of Toronto student newspaper), vol LXXXII, No. 26, November 19, (1962), p 7
Year: 1962
[New media] can be entrusted only to new artists.
“The Agenbite of Outwit”, In Location Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1963), reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 125
Year: 1963
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 18
Year: 1964
[Chaplin] adopted the classical steps of ballet to a movie mime that converged exactly the right blend of the lyric and the ironic that is found also in Prufrock and Ulysses. Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to release the power of another. In a simpler form, it is the technique employed by Charles Boyer in his kind of French-English blend of urbane, throaty delirium.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p54
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Media Reprocess Media
No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 64
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Mastering Technology
The percussed victims of the new technology have invariably muttered clichés about the impracticality of artists and their fanciful preferences. But in the past century it has come to be generally acknowledged that, in the words of Wyndham Lewis, "The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present." Knowledge of this simple fact is now needed for human survival. The ability of the artist to sidestep the bully blow of new technology of any age, and to parry such violence with full awareness, is age-old. Equally age-old is the inability of the percussed victims, who cannot sidestep the new violence, to recognize their need of the artist. To reward and to make celebrities of artists can, also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 65
Year: 1964
I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties...
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 66
Year: 1964
Only the dedicated artist seems to have the power for encountering the present actuality.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 70
Year: 1964
It is the artist's job to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit attention to the new. To this end, the artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 254
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Playfulness
Art is a CARE package dispatched to undernourished areas of the human sensorium.
Letter to Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, May 11, 1964, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 299
Year: 1964
If we have used the arts at their very best as a means of heightening our awareness of the otherwise unconscious environment, then turning a whole skill to the making of the environment itself into a work of art, namely, of transcendent awareness, would seem to be the logic of this form. … The possibility of using the total environment as a work of art, as an artifact, is a quite startling and perhaps exhilarating image but it seems to be forced upon us. The need to become completely autonomous and aware of all the consequence of everything we’re doing before the consequences occur is where we’re heading.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965), in Understanding Me (2003) p 75
Year: 1965
Artists in general and in all ages are engaged in grappling directly with the ever new problems of experience resulting from technological change
Quoted in F. Shoemaker & L. Forsdale (Eds Grammars for the Newer Media, In Communication in General Education: College Composition and Communication, (1960), p 22. Portions later reprinted as “The New Media and the New Education”, in The Basilian Teacher, December (1961), p 93-100
Year: 1960
Pop art serves to remind us, however, that we have fashioned for ourselves a world of artifacts and images that are intended not to train perceptions or awareness but to be merged with them as the primitive man merges with his environment.
“The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,” The University of Windsor Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, (1966), p 2, reprinted in Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 243 , ,and McLuhan Unbound #4, (2017),p 8
Year: 1966
Mechanized specialism permitted high virtuosity in the shaping of the art object, but such objects were denied any real role in the social life. They were classified as "art" and made peripheral to society and to individual consciousness alike.
“The Emperor’s Old Clothes”, (1966), reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #20, (2017),p 13
Year: 1966
It is one of the ironies of the electronic age that the businessman must become alert and highly trained in the world of the arts. It is one of the mysteries of cybernation that it is forever challenged by the need to simulate consciousness.
“Cybernetics and Human Culture,” (1964), in Understanding Me (2003), p 44
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Management
It is human consciousness itself that is the great artifact of man. The making and shaping of consciousness from moment to moment is the supreme artistic task of all individuals. To qualify and to perfect this process on a world environmental scale is the inherent potential of each new technology.
“The Emperor’s Old Clothes” , (1966), reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #20 (2017), p 14
Year: 1966
Chapters:
Consciousness | Individual
The artist provides not the action, but the reaction to the new situation.
"Marshall McLuhan - The Man Who Infuriates the Critics." An interview with Thomas P.McDonnell in U.S. Catholic, Vol. 31, No. 11, (1966) ,p 29
Year: 1966
Art as radar acts as "an early alarm system," as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression. If art is an "early warning system," to use the phrase from World War II, when radar was new, art has the utmost relevance not only to media study but to the development of media controls.
“Introduction to the Second Edition”, in Understanding Media (1966), p xi
Year: 1966
The role of art has always been to train perceptions of the world you live in, not of some other world. So the older poets looked at that way are still relevant, they are attempts to make people see what is going on, or painters, or musicians, likewise. They are still valid.
“The New Education”, in The Basilian Teacher, Vol 7, No. 2, February, (1967), p 72
Year: 1967
Art makes the corporate and communal accessible to the individual, whose task it is to assimilate the tradition, to modify it in relation to the new situations that are continuously forming.
The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 119
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Individual
The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely “well adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends.
The Medium is The Massage, (1967), p 88
Year: 1967
[Artists are those with the] power to see environments as they really are.
The Medium is The Massage ,(1967), p 88
Year: 1967
Art is anything you can get away with.
Widely attributed to Marshall McLuhan but likely not of his invention. Used also by Andy Warhol and a frequently sounded slogan of the 1960s. The line appears in The Medium Is the Massage (1967), in large type, spread over several pages (132-136) without crediting any other source. It is also spoken in the audio LP, “The Medium Is the Massage” (1967), Side B, Transcript: 11:50.
Year: 1960
The artist is a person who is especially aware of the challenge and dangers of new environments presented to human sensibility. Whereas the ordinary person seeks security by numbing his perceptions against the impact of new experience, the artist delights in this novelty and instinctively creates situations that both reveal it and compensate for it.
“The Emperor's New Clothes”, (1968), reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 339
Year: 1968
The artist today might well inquire whether he will have the time to make a space to meet the spaces that he will meet. “Paul Klee declares, ‘I want to be the newborn, knowing nothing, about Europe… to be almost primitive.’” (Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New)
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 31
Year: 1968
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 213
Year: 1968
Seurat is the art fulcrum between Renaissance visual and modern tactile. The coalescing of inner and outer, subject and object.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 181
Year: 1968
The artist is the enema of society.
“B SIDE”, in The Medium Is the Massage audio LP, 1967, 11:50
Year: 1967
At very high speeds all forms become recognizable as patterns. At that moment they become art forms.
“The global theatre”, in Ekistics 190 (Sept 1971), p 181
Year: 1971
It is the distinction of the "artist" in any field that he commands this power to convey the effects of things when the ordinary person is merely numbed or robotized by things. The fascination of child behavior and child art is the same.
Take Today; The Executive As Dropout, (1972), p 89
Year: 1972
This process transforms the torture of work into the refined torture of art - the primal curse laid on man: he will earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Today the sweat is empathy, and the self-knowledge that is the most awful form of torment is awareness of one's own sordid motives manifested in their consequences.
Take Today; The Executive As Dropout, (1972), p 166
Year: 1972
We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature.
Take Today; The Executive As Dropout, (1972), p 166
Year: 1972
The artist in any field is the person who anticipates the effects in his own times, both of new knowledge and of his own actions. The art of remaking the world eternally new is achieved by careful and deliberate dislocation of ordinary perceptions. Even the surrealist had this ambition — to attain a fresh vision of the world by the juxtaposition of ordinary things, for example, the "fur-lined teacup" and "Mona Lisa's moustache."
“The Argument: Causality in the Electric World”, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 17, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005), p 28
Year: 1973
The art of remaking the world eternally new is achieved by careful and delicate dislocation of ordinary perceptions.
“The Argument: Causality in the Electric World”, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 17, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005), p 28
Year: 1973
I wonder why people prefer to think of art as something contained inside something else. Is this the museum mentality?
“The Place and Function of Art" (1976), p 25
Year: 1976
The job of the artist is to command attention.
Quoted by B.W. Powe in “Marshall McLuhan: The Put-On” in A Climate Charged (1984), p 9
Year: 1984
The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 98
Year: 1988
As a cultural mediator, it is the role of the artist to keep the community in conscious relation to the changing and hidden ground of its preferred objectives.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 26
Year: 1989
Artists have, during the past century, been vividly aware of the ever-increasing measure in which the audience shares in the creative process. This is an aspect of the “mass audience” that is frequently deplored and misunderstood by the representatives of the old mechanical culture and environment. Such people tend to see the mass audience as the mere obliteration of old landmarks and of individual differences. They pay no attention to the increasingly creative awareness of people who are deeply involved in one another by means of electric circuitry. They are engaged in the ancient routine of regarding the patterns of the previous environment with nostalgic reverence.
“The Future of Art,” unpublished typescript dated August 3, 1979, p 1
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Authority of Knowledge
One of the things that has become important is leisure. An artist is never at work; it’s because he’s always at leisure. When he’d totally involved in his work, he is not working, it’s play, it’s leisure… A gentleman never had any visible means of support because he was supposed to be an integral being. He didn’t fragment himself, he was totally involved, always at leisure. A great image of Sherlock Holmes himself. … We’re heading that way. Instead of heading into a world of joblessness, we’re heading towards a period of creative involvement, which is leisure. Involvement is far more demanding of our energies than any job could be. But when you’re totally involved, you’re playing, you’re not working. You’re at leisure.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 105
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Playfulness
When one environment goes around another, the old one becomes art. When you put any object inside another environment, it becomes a work of art. When it goes intoa. Museum, it becomes a work of art. After all, there are objects of everyday use that are now in the museum, and when they’re in the museum they become works of art.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 149
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Environment
I think most artists are absolutely aghast at the world they live in, and they just wonder how it is possible for the world to be like that. And they never stop until they have shaped a pattern that explains why. They are incredulous. They simply say, “It couldn’t be. Nothing could be that amazing.”
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 153
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Perception