Art & Creativity Quote by Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan’s sentence lands like a compliment with a trapdoor: “every intelligent person” sounds democratic until you notice it quietly installs an IQ gate at the museum entrance. The line flatters the reader into agreement, then pivots to a jab at “the people who call themselves modernists,” framing them as a self-appointed sect speaking in code. That’s the move: not a debate about quality, but a dispute about translation and power.

Coming from a media theorist obsessed with how forms shape perception, the “language” metaphor is doing heavy lifting. McLuhan isn’t only talking about jargon or obscure technique; he’s diagnosing a shift in cultural circuitry. Great art, in his telling, plugs into shared human hardware: pattern, rhythm, image, story. Modernism, by contrast, is presented as building a private protocol that requires initiation. The subtext is suspicion of institutions that manage access to meaning - critics, curators, academic departments - and of avant-gardes that treat confusion as a credential.

The context matters: mid-century North America watching mass media standardize attention while high modernism consolidated prestige in galleries and universities. McLuhan, famous for arguing that the medium changes the message, is also implicitly arguing that modernists changed the medium and then pretended the resulting opacity was the public’s fault. Still, the quote is intentionally provocative: it reduces modernism’s real project - capturing a fractured, industrial, postwar consciousness - to elitism. That simplification is part of its rhetorical force, and part of its tell.