A Quote by Marshall McLuhan

What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.

Marshall McLuhan

Quote Topics

Art Artifacts Call Enhancing Human Perception Seem Specialist Would

Quote Author

Marshall McLuhan
Canadian - Sociologist
July 21, 1911 - December 31, 1980

Creativity is an innate function in a human being, as we see in tribal peoples, who spent their considerable leisure time making religious artifacts and sacred art. That is what I would call a direct culture, in that everybody in it is directly in touch with all the elements, both of the culture and of the environment.

Michael Ventura

I personally have never trusted museums. ... It is because museums, broadly speaking, live off of the art and artifacts of others, often art and artifacts that have been obtained by dubious means. But they also manipulate whatever it is they present to the public; hence, until Judy Chicago, in the 1970s ... few women artists were hung in any major museum. Indian artists? Artifacts only, please. Black artists? Something musical, maybe? And so forth.

Alice Walker

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling.

Leo Tolstoy

The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a viewer's journey, shifts the emphasis from process to product, and lacks individuality and openness. It's not that art should be seen only in rutty bombed-out environments, but it should seem alive.

Jerry Saltz

I hadn't slept in 20 years. I would sleep a couple hours a night, and I went from specialist to specialist and they could never find out why.

William Regal

Buildings for me represent opportunities of agency, transformation, and storytelling. They are not just artifacts. There is this big tradition of buildings-as-artifacts - constructed artifacts - but for me they are these incredible sites of negotiation.

David Adjaye

One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover. Great works of art seem to look different every time one stands before them. They seem to be as inexhaustible and unpredictable as real human beings.

Ernst Gombrich

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.

Leo Tolstoy

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

David Foster Wallace

Enhancing a woman's silhouette and enhancing a woman's beauty - both contribute to enhancing her confidence, so they're synonymous, really.

L'Wren Scott

The bands of perception vary greatly. There is the human band of perception. There are lots of different bands of perception. Simply because we are in one band of perception, doesn't mean others are not there.

Frederick Lenz

Art is a conduit toward human needs and perception.

John Maeda

[In the modern game] you're either a clay court specialist, a grass court specialist or a hard court specialist... or you're Roger Federer...

Jimmy Connors

If you scroll through all the movies I've worked on, you can understand how I was a specialist in westerns, love stories, political movies, action thrillers, horror movies, and so on. So in other words, I'm no specialist, because I've done everything. I'm a specialist in music.