Wszyscy jestesmy artystami? Marshall McLuhan i Joseph Beuys o społecznej roli sztuki

The objective of the article is to present and compare two concepts of art, both of which include the slogan ‘everyone is an artist’: one by the Canadian media expert Marshall McLuhan and the other by the avant-garde German artist Joseph Beuys. McLuhan addressed these issues in his theory of media, whereas Beuys included them in his theory of art, which he described as ‘social sculpture’. Both concepts are the result of the authors’ reflection on the situation of art in the second half of the twentieth century, and they provide an interesting example of an attempt to transfer artistic theory to social ground and to use it to create a vision of a new order. In both concepts, the society appears as a work of art, and each of its members is not only able but even obliged to co-create it.