Aging & Wisdom Quote by Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan doesn’t flatter art as decoration or personal expression; he drafts it into civil defense. Calling art a DEW line borrows Cold War vocabulary for radar nets built to detect incoming threats before anyone could see them. The provocation is deliberate: “the old culture” is a complacent empire, and art is the early-warning apparatus that registers tremors before institutions, markets, or politics can even name them.

The intent is diagnostic, not celebratory. McLuhan treats artists as sensors inside a media ecosystem, picking up shifts in perception, attention, and social rhythm as new technologies rearrange the conditions of life. The subtext is a critique of cultural management: official culture reacts late, because it’s invested in continuity. Art, at its “most significant,” isn’t there to confirm shared values; it’s there to make the audience feel the next environment arriving. That’s why it so often looks like scandal, nonsense, or ugliness in the moment. The point isn’t taste. It’s signal.

Context matters: McLuhan wrote in an era when television, advertising, and mass media were rewiring public consciousness, while nuclear anxiety made “warning systems” a daily metaphor. By yoking art to surveillance infrastructure, he also implies a grim irony: cultures prefer reassurance, but survival demands perception. Art becomes a kind of cultural seismograph, and the people most likely to dismiss it are precisely the ones most endangered by what it detects.