Daily Inspiration Quote by Marshall McLuhan

Art, for McLuhan, isn’t a pedestal object; it’s a successful hack. “Anything you can get away with” swaps reverence for strategy, putting the emphasis on permission, not purity. The line is funny in a slightly incriminating way: it makes the museum sound like a bouncer’s line and the artist like someone slipping past the rope. That’s the point. Art isn’t defined by internal essence; it’s defined by a social system deciding to let it count.

McLuhan’s context matters. Writing in the age of television, advertising, and mass reproduction, he watched images and messages circulate faster than traditional gatekeepers could police them. If “the medium is the message,” then art becomes less a category of special objects and more a function of media environments and institutional rituals: galleries, critics, collectors, classrooms, algorithms. “Get away with” implies a contest between novelty and legibility, provocation and plausible framing. The artist’s job is partly to build the alibi: the concept statement, the reference, the curated backstory that makes the strange feel inevitable.

The subtext also needles taste itself. If art is what you can get away with, then “good taste” starts to look like a code enforced by people with platforms and budgets. The quote doesn’t deny craft or feeling; it exposes how often they’re secondary to packaging and power. McLuhan’s sting is that aesthetic value isn’t discovered like a mineral. It’s negotiated, performed, and, when the performance is convincing enough, retroactively treated as timeless.