For many who have spent years honing their skills of expression in a particular discipline, the ideas of Schoenberg may seem much more sympathetic than those of Beuys. However, I will argue that Beuys’ assertion does not take away the need to dedicate to a chosen form of expression and does not imply that community art means ‘anything goes’ as denigrators would have us believe.
In fact the opposite. The more people realise their creative potential in what they choose to do within society and respect and debate and nourish the creativity of others, the more we can have a functioning democracy of mutual respect for human endeavour. And without that equality of creative expression and understanding, we risk continuing in the malaise of the decline of capitalist society into a septic monoculture of unbridled consumption and destruction that seeks to extinguish the natural world as well as the unnatural world it has engendered.