Marshall McLuhan on Art

"The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal."

"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."

"The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet."

"Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation."

"In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground."

"Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity."

"The Greek “point of view” in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages."

"The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism."

"Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave."

"The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' had tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity."

"The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves."

"The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere cultures."

"Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure."

"The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view."

"Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement."

"Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world."

"All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values."

"Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia."

"Art is anything you can get away with."

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century."

"Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces."

"Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog."

"The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer."

"Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium."

"The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the “unified field” of electric all-at-onceness."

"The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts."