Art; Pointing Out

"A poem should not mean
But be."
— Archibald Macleish, in The Vanishing Point, Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, p. 33.

Chinese saying applies: "People in the West are always getting ready to live."
— The Vanishing Point, Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, p. 113.

"Art is the expression of an enormous preference."
— Wyndham Lewis, in The Vanishing Point, Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, p. 125.

....When two or more environments encounter one another by direct interface, they tend to manifest their distinctive qualities. Comparison and contrast have always been a means of sharpening perception in the arts as well as in general experience. Indeed, it is upon this pattern that all the structures of art have been reared. Any artistic endeavor includes the preparing of an environment for human attention. A poem or a painting is in every sense a teaching machine for the training of perception and judgment. The artist is a person who is especially aware of the challenge and dangers of new environments presented to human sensibility. Whereas the ordinary person seeks security by numbing his perceptions against the impact of new experience, the artist delights in this novelty and instinctively creates situations that both reveal it and compensate for it. The artist studies the distortion of sensory life produced by new environmental programming and tends to create artistic situations that correct the sensory bias and derangement brought about by the new form. In social terms the artist can be regarded as a navigator who gives adequate compass bearings in spite of magnetic deflection of the needle by the changing play of forces. So understand, the artist is not a peddlar of ideals or lofty experiences. He is rather the indispensable aid to action and reflection alike.
— The Vanishing Point, Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, p. 238.

....Only the visual sense has the properties of continuity and connectedness that are assumed in Euclidean space. Only the visual sense can create the impression of a continuum. Axex Leighton has said, "To the blind all things are sudden." To touch and hearing each moment is unique, but to the sense of sight the world is uniform and continuous and connected. These are the properties of pictorial space which we often confuse with rationality itself.
— Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, The Vanishing Point, p. 239.

     Pablo shook his head. "Kahnweiler's right," he said. "The point is, art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal, to be used against the established order. Once art becomes official and open to anyone, then it becomes the new academicism." He tossed the cablegram down onto the table. "How can I support an idea like that? If art is ever given the keys to the city, it will be because it's been so watered down, rendered so impotent, that it's not worth fighting for."
     I reminded him that Malherle had said a poet is of no more use to the state than a man who spends his time playing ninepins. "Of course," Pablo said. "And why did Plato say poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way. Of course the state has the right to chase him away — from its point of view — and if he is really an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat — worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. People just don't have that much vision."
— Françoise Gilot/Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, in Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, The Vanishing Point, p. 246.