[Ads-l] Quote: Art is anything you can get away with. - Marshall McLuhan (1967)

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

In 2019 the Italian conceptual artist and provocateur Maurizio
Cattelan used duct tape to attach a banana to the wall of an art
gallery. He dubbed the resultant artwork "Comedian".

After Cattelan sold the quasi-sculpture for a lucrative price he was
sued by another artist who had previously taped a banana and an orange
to a green background. The presiding judge was inspired to refer to a
humorous definition of art from the 1960s: "Art is anything you can
get away with". The judge credited Canadian communications theorist
Marshall McLuhan with this definition.

The Wikiquote webpage for McLuhan claims that this remark is in his
book "Understanding Media" (1964), but I accessed that book, and the
quotation was absent.

Instead, the earliest close match I found appeared in the 1967 book
"The Medium is the Massage" by McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin
Fiore. The quotation was spread across five pages:

[ref] 1967, The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin
Fiore, Quote Page to 132 to 136, Bantam Books, New York. (Verified
with hardcopy) [/ref]

[Begin excerpt]
Art is anything you can get away with.
[End excerpt]

The photographs accompanying the statement showed a massive sculpture:

[Begin excerpt]
"The biggest and best woman in the world," an 82-foot-long,
20-foot-high sculpture, in Moderna  Museet, Stockholm. You can walk
around in her.
[End excerpt]

The Quote Investigator article is here:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/08/10/art-anything/

Feedback welcome,
Garson O'Toole

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org