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Who really said it

Art is what you can get away with

Not Andy Warhol — actually Marshall McLuhan Marshall McLuhan 1911–1980 · Canadian philosopher & media theorist
Disputed In copyright

The earliest documented appearance is in The Medium is the Massage (Bantam Books, 1967), the picture-book McLuhan made with designer Quentin Fiore, where the line runs in display type across pages 132–136 — and the documented wording is “Art is anything you can get away with.” Quote Investigator, which verified the book in hardcopy, credits McLuhan and records no Warhol attestation anywhere in its chronology; the familiar “what” version circulates under Warhol’s name with no source attached.

Last verified 24 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Art is anything you can get away with.” Marshall McLuhan (with Quentin Fiore), The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 132–136. Commonly misquoted as "Art is what you can get away with" and misattributed to Andy Warhol. Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Andy Warhol. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Marshall McLuhan and the publishers of The Medium is the Massage). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Marshall McLuhan — Canadian philosopher & media theorist. Theme: "Art is what you can get away with". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Art is what you can get away with". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The documented source

Work
The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
Authors
Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore; produced by Jerome Agel
Published
1967 — Bantam Books, New York
Location
Spread across pages 132–136 (verified with hardcopy by Quote Investigator)

Art is anything you can get away with.

[facing photographs, captioned] “The biggest and best woman in the world,” an 82-foot-long, 20-foot-high sculpture, in Moderna Museet, Stockholm. You can walk around in her. The Medium is the Massage, 1967

The book is a designed collage rather than continuous prose — the sentence is set in large type running across five pages, facing photographs of a colossal walk-in sculpture. Text as transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from a hardcopy of the 1967 Bantam edition.

Borrowable scan
The Medium is the Massage (Bantam Books, 1967) at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: Art Is Anything You Can Get Away With

The paper trail

  • 1967 — earliest located appearance. Quote Investigator ↗ reports that the earliest close match it found is in The Medium is the Massage by McLuhan and Fiore, spread over pages 132 to 136, verified with hardcopy of the Bantam Books edition.
  • February and April 1967 — it escapes the book. Quote Investigator cites a February 25, 1967 Camden, New Jersey Courier-Post item quoting it from the forthcoming book, and an April 13, 1967 Daily Tar Heel report of it chalked on the ground at a Chapel Hill “chalk-in” — full chronology ↗.
  • 1968 — credited to McLuhan in print. Alan Levy’s The Culture Vultures uses the line with an explicit credit: “McLuhan has also said, ‘Art is anything you can get away with’” — quoted by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • The Warhol version has no such trail. The “what you can get away with” wording circulates under Warhol’s name on unsourced aggregator pages — Goodreads ↗ gives no book, no date, and flags its quotes as community-added and unverified.
In copyright

The Medium is the Massage was first published in 1967, well after the 1931 U.S. public-domain cutoff, so the text is still in copyright — and the book’s photographs and layout carry their own separate rights. Quote the sentence with attribution as fair comment; do not reproduce the spread.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Where the Warhol credit comes from

This is a wording swap and a name swap at once. The version that travels under Andy Warhol’s name (“what you can get away with”) is not the version anyone has documented, and no primary Warhol source — book, interview, diary or film — has ever been produced for it.

Andy Warhol No source cited

Goodreads ↗ carries “Art is what you can get away with.” credited simply to “— Andy Warhol,” with 613 likes, no book, no date, and the site’s own note that quotes are community-added and unverified. Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ of the saying names McLuhan, Fiore, Frank Richardson, Terence Trent D’Arby and Theodor W. Adorno — and does not mention Warhol at any point.

Andy Warhol Sold under his name

The print seller McGaw Graphics ↗ sells a poster whose title is the line itself, listed under Warhol as the artist, with an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts copyright notice on the page. A quote on a wall in a frame is very hard to argue with.

Understanding Media (1964) Checked — absent

Wikiquote ↗ lists “Art is anything you can get away with” under Understanding Media (1964), without a page number, and a “whatever” variant under the 1967 book. Writing to the American Dialect Society list, Garson O’Toole reported: “The Wikiquote webpage for McLuhan claims that this remark is in his book ‘Understanding Media’ (1964), but I accessed that book, and the quotation was absent” — ADS-L, August 2022 ↗.

Terence Trent D’Arby and Theodor W. Adorno Later drift

Per Quote Investigator ↗, a 2000 collection compiled by Vincent Fu printed the line credited to the singer Terence Trent D’Arby, and a 2006 book by Bhesham R. Sharma presented it as “in line with Adorno’s view” — though without directly crediting Adorno.

The documented sentence is McLuhan’s, it reads “Art is anything you can get away with,” and its earliest located home is The Medium is the Massage (1967) — Quote Investigator ↗, verified with hardcopy.

Context

Why it sticks to Warhol

The line is a joke about the art market, and Warhol was the art market’s face — the man who sold soup cans as paintings. So the aphorism fits him better than it fits a Toronto English professor, which is most of the reason it drifted. But McLuhan and Warhol were working the same territory in the same years, and the traffic ran the other way: The Medium is the Massage came out in 1967, at the height of the Factory, and McLuhan was already the era’s designated explainer of media and celebrity.

The saying has kept doing real work. In 2022, ruling on the copyright suit over Maurizio Cattelan’s banana taped to a gallery wall, a U.S. district judge reached for it — and credited McLuhan, not Warhol: “a banana taped to a wall recalls Marshall McLuhan’s definition of art—‘anything you can get away with.’” That courtroom citation is what prompted Quote Investigator’s inquiry ↗ in the first place.

The documented wording is “anything,” not “what” — and the name on it is McLuhan.

What the page actually looks like

The Medium is the Massage is a designed object, not a book of paragraphs: Fiore laid McLuhan’s aphorisms across full-bleed spreads. That is why Quote Investigator cites the line as pages 132 to 136 rather than a single page — the sentence is broken up and set large across five pages.

The photographs facing it show a colossal walk-in sculpture, captioned in the book as “The biggest and best woman in the world,” an 82-foot-long, 20-foot-high sculpture in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In a 2022 American Dialect Society mailing-list post ↗, quote researcher Garson O’Toole identified the sculpture as Niki de Saint Phalle’s, noting a webpage giving its title as “She – a Cathedral.”

The phrase escaped into the wild fast. Quote Investigator records a Camden, New Jersey newspaper flagging it as a “pearl on art” from the forthcoming book on February 25, 1967, and student journalists at Chapel Hill reporting it chalked on the ground at a Fine Arts Festival “chalk-in” on April 13, 1967.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Creativity Freedom Truth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: Art Is Anything You Can Get Away Withquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: full dated chronology from 1907 to 2022, tracing the saying to McLuhan and Fiore’s 1967 book (verified with hardcopy).
ADS-L: Quote: Art is anything you can get away with — Marshall McLuhan (1967)listserv.linguistlist.org

Garson O’Toole’s American Dialect Society post, where he reports checking Understanding Media (1964) and finding the quotation absent.
Marshall McLuhanen.wikiquote.org

Lists both “anything” and “whatever” variants under McLuhan — including the Understanding Media placement that O’Toole could not confirm.
The Medium is the Massage (1967 Bantam edition)archive.org

Borrowable scan of the 1967 Bantam Books edition — the edition Quote Investigator cites for pages 132–136.
The Medium Is the Massageen.wikipedia.org

Background on the book: co-created by McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore, coordinated by Jerome Agel, published by Bantam Books in 1967.
Jeff Jacoby: ‘Art is anything you can get away with’jewishworldreview.com

A 2023 column that states plainly the aphorism is McLuhan’s and is “often misattributed to Andy Warhol.”

The real source

Who actually wrote it

Marshall McLuhan

1911–1980 · Canadian philosopher & media theorist

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is a cornerstone of media theory — the man behind The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964) and the coinages “the medium is the message” and “the global village.” He spent most of his career at the University of Toronto. The Medium is the Massage (1967), made with graphic designer Quentin Fiore and produced by Jerome Agel, was his bestseller: a collage of aphorisms set against photographs, which is exactly the form in which this line appears.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 132–136. Identified as the earliest close match located by Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Art Is Anything You Can Get Away With,” August 10, 2022.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Art is what you can get away with’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/art-is-what-you-can-get-away-with/

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