October 22, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™ Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science by Nelson S. Thall . Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca. and McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
The Rise and Fall of the Vanishing Point: What Art Tells Us About Our Dominant Sense
A Student of Technology asks:
Why did painters start using a vanishing point, and why did artists like Picasso abandon it?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Because art can reveal more than what a culture looks at. It can reveal how that culture organizes experience. McLuhan’s insight was that media change the balance of our senses, and artists can make those changes visible before the rest of us recognize them.¹ We are dealing with the sensory effects of a whole mixture of technologies, not one invention working in isolation. VANISHING POINT working copy-1 Much medieval painting did not organize its space around a single, consistent vanishing point. Renaissance linear perspective made the fixed observer its organizing principle. The picture became a window onto a scene arranged for someone looking in from outside. That system emerged in early fifteenth-century Florence, before Gutenberg. Alberti described it in 1435; Gutenberg’s Bible followed around 1455.² Print did not invent perspective. But McLuhan argued that printing “confirmed and extended the new visual stress.”³ The printed page and the perspective picture reinforced a way of organizing experience around separation, order and a private point of view. The eye became the model for putting the world in order.
Then electric communication began to challenge that arrangement. Morse’s Washington–Baltimore telegraph line opened in 1844. The telephone and, later, radio extended the change. Messages could cross distances without waiting for a messenger to travel between the sender and receiver.⁴ For McLuhan, the significance was not simply faster delivery. It was a shift from detached observation toward simultaneous involvement. He described this electric environment in acoustic and tactile terms: acoustic because experience surrounds us rather than lining up before us; tactile because the senses interact, rather than leaving the eye in sole command. “Tactile” here means more than touching something with your skin.⁵ This is the setting in which he read Cubism. Picasso and Braque broke with the single, stable viewpoint, bringing different angles into the same composition. Picasso’s The Factory at Horta de Ebro, painted in 1909, belongs to that break with conventional pictorial space.⁶ McLuhan saw the larger change as a move from viewing an isolated scene to grasping a field of relationships all at once. The claim is not that the telegraph made Picasso paint a particular picture. It is that Cubism made visible a pattern of experience McLuhan also recognized in the electric environment.¹
So the vanishing point is a clue, not a mechanical test of which sense rules an entire population. Its rise, and its rejection by the Cubists, help us recognize the difference between a world arranged for a detached spectator and a world experienced through overlapping relationships. The eye did not disappear. Neither did perspective. What came under challenge was the fixed viewpoint’s claim to organize the whole experience. Here is the warning I draw from that. We can carry print-age habits into an electric environment and mistake our familiar viewpoint for the whole situation. We look for one straight line through an environment pressing on us from every side. Art gives us a chance to recognize that mismatch. But if we look only at what the artist has pictured, we miss what the picture reveals about the way we perceive. We keep fighting the new world with the old eye.
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Notes
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), especially “The Medium Is the Message” and “Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity.” These passages supply McLuhan’s interpretation of Cubism, changing sensory relationships and the artist’s anticipatory role. They do not establish a single-cause historical explanation of Cubism. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- National Gallery, London, “Perspective” and “Linear perspective,” on Brunelleschi and Alberti’s De pictura (1435); Library of Congress, “The Gutenberg Bible,” dating its completion to approximately 1455. National Gallery
- Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), passage beginning “Printing, a ditto device,” reproduced in the University of Houston’s collection of McLuhan quotations. This replaces the unverified quotation and page references in the earlier draft. University of Houston
- Library of Congress, “First telegraph message, 24 May 1844,” documenting Morse’s Washington–Baltimore demonstration. For the later technological setting discussed alongside Cubism, see the Museum of Modern Art, “What Is Cubism?” The Library of Congress
- McLuhan’s descriptions of tactility as interaction among the senses appear in Understanding Media (1964) and other writings. Relevant primary passages are reproduced in “Tactility,” McLuhan’s New Sciences (November 2021). The acoustic–tactile account here is an explanation of his terminology. mcluhansnewsciences.com
- Museum of Modern Art, “Multiple Perspectives,” on Cubism’s combination of viewpoints; Bridgeman Images, collection record for Picasso’s The Factory at the Village of Horta de Ebro (1909), State Hermitage Museum. The Museum of Modern ArtAll intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com