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

[Jonathan Lighter]

> ...best woman in the world.

A woman shouldn't be that cold.

Otherwise, a similar comment is something like "Art is whatever somebody
wants to call art."

JL



On Fri, Aug 12, 2022 at 6:44 AM ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>
wrote:

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


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