Essential McLuhan 336 technique to external nature, transforming nature into an art object. Beginning with Baudelaire and Rimbaud and continuing in Hopkins and Eliot and James Joyce, the poets turned their attention to language as a probe. Long used as an environment, language became an instrument of exploration and research. It became an antienvironment. It became Pop Art along with the graphic probes of Larry Rivers, Rauschenberg and many others. The artist as a maker of antienvironments permits us to perceive that much is newly environmental and therefore most active in transforming situations. This would seem to be why the artist has in many circles in the past century been called the enemy, the criminal. 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 everyone, 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 Malherbe 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 and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso) It helps to explain why news has a natural bias toward crime and bad news. It is this kind of news that enables us to perceive our world. The detective since Poe’s Dupin has tended to be a probe, an artist of the big town, an artist-enemy, as it were. Conventionally, society is always one phase back, is never environmental. Paradoxically, it is the antecedent environment that is always being upgraded for our attention. The new environment always uses the old environment as its material.