Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create... he discovers.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.

I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.

I feel like every artist has an opportunity to create something new and to challenge themselves to reach out to a new crowd.

For me, as an artist, I think you have to experiment.

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

Don't only practise your art, but force your way into its secrets.

As an artist, you're always trying to reach a new height, do something new, try something you haven't done before, and push your boundaries.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

All art is a kind of exploring. To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.

When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my South End studio at five o'clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it.

It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.

I think nearly every artist continually wants to reach the edge of nothingness - the point where you can’t go any further.

I've noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it's various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

I like people that challenge their art, not only in the purist way, but also in terms of how they could provoke and make something different.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Some of the most radical work is being done in the most commercially pop venues, and some of the most boring work is being done in avant-garde territory.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches.

If you get stuck, draw with a different pen. Change your tools; it may free your thinking.