Marshall McLuhan (b. 1911, Canada – d. 1980, Canada)
Art is anything you can get away with, 1964

Ha, I googled for McLuhan in order to follow up on some reference in another text – and this handy list of [allegedly] his quotes popped up. And I recognised most of them, while name McLuhan did not really ring any bells. In particular, I found it funny that he must have said that “art is anything you can get away with” – I’ve been saying something along those lines about my own artistic attempts without even knowing that I kind of been quoting someone. Let’s say that establishes his pertinence to my practice and therefore qualifies this post for my blog.

But there is also something about someone’s philosophical work resulting in a richness of catch phrases that become internalised as “common sense” of sorts without any link to the person who coined them or specificity of the context where they were uttered. And then popping up like small portions of “truth” at random googling (that also leads to a vast number of citations and some misattributions upon further googling to verify the source), like Mona Lisas on random shopping bags… There is something of relevance there, too, although I am struggling to figure out what. Can it be related to our preference for simplicity vs my attempts to rip the simplicities apart, unveiling the complexities they are trying to hide? Maybe… not sure yet…