Marshall McLuhan Quotes

There's an audience for all kinds of great art.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

I have trouble with modern art. But in general, all art forms fascinate me - art is the way human beings express what we can't say in words.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

I think that some works are more accessible than others.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.

It may well be that the pictures of Courbet, Manet, Monet and their like contain beauties which escape the notice of such old romantic heads as ours, already streaked with silver threads.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

I also paint, draw and I'm into film and photography as well, and the same thing applies to all of them. You're presenting this material to the general public and hoping that they're going to 'get' what you're doing. Some don't, some do.