Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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.

For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place.

The modern world thinks of art as very important: something close to the meaning of life.

I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.

Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

The Internet doesn't always play a great role for art, especially art in the street, as people take what they see for the final image of it. But the most interesting thing about street art is to see it for real, to understand what it means and where it's displayed.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

What I look for when I see a piece of art for the first time is some kind of emotional, intellectual experience, that's a combination of both of those things and is informed by my knowledge and something new that I see the artist doing.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.

How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?

I feel that art deals with issues way before any political organisation.

I like art with a visible string to the world.

Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare.

In England, pop art and fine art stand resolutely back to back.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.