Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) is best known as a media theorist--many consider him the founder of media studies--but he was an important theorist of art, too. A near-household name for decades, McLuhan remains a fascinating and even cultish figure in art history. However, his connections with the art of his own time has been largely unexplored. Art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more interestingly, that McLuhan's work directly influenced the art and artists of his time.

Kitnick builds the story of McLuhan's entanglement with artists by carefully forging connections between him, his theories, and the artists themselves. The story is packed with big names: Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Niki de Saint Phalle, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and others. By masterfully weaving this history with McLuhan's own words and his provocations of what art is and what artists should do, Kitnick reveals not only McLuhan's mutual influence and confluence of art and theory at particular historical moments, but also that McLuhan might even be considered an artist in his own right. The illuminating result sheds light on new aspects of McLuhan, showing him not just as a theorist, or an influencer, but as a richly multifaceted figure who, among his many other accolades, affected multiple generations of artists and their works. The book finishes with Kitnick overlaying McLuhan's ethos onto the state of contemporary and post-internet art. This final channeling of McLuhan is a swift and beautiful analysis, with a personal touch, of art's recent transgressions and what its future may hold.