sensibility. He had a good ear. A good ear for other 
things. A good ear for language.

You know, beyond a certain point it’s very hard to 
say what is an artist. I think McLuhan certainly 
was an artist. But he hated aesthetics. He hated 
aesthetes. He hated the people for whom the art 
state was real. He felt that art had a job to do, 
and as long as the artists did that job—which was 
to update the culture, upgrade his or her 
contemporaries—then it was worth looking at. But 
anything to do with ornamentation, making a life a 
little more comfortable, was just pure 
consumerism, nostalgia, you know.