Hi Leon
Why is it always so late? I read your contribution again after 2 weeks and I thought, wow. You  instantly understood the link between destruction and protection.
1. What might or ought the artist and her/his art seek to destroy, in the service of protecting, or opening up, a vital space?Yes this ‘vital space’ is also an art space. But not just an art space: it is a space for politics and the body. The vital space is also the space dividing artists from their audience: the space policed by the museum with is careful management of this boundary. What can  first be ‘destroyed’ is the sense of the lonely artist, the author confronted by the world, the nineteenth century idea that has been gradually transformed into the self-invented cultural worker negotiating the possibilities of the culture industry in its new formation as a knowledge factory.
So what is being destroyed is beyond the idea of the work of art as a product: what is being destroyed is the concept of the artist as a brand, as a product.
Many people are grappling to find a way out of this confined space. Many artists are fighting for new ways to be part of the new cultural dissidence in the West. It’s a question of finding the clear political message hidden within the bushes of ideology in the West (when they leave the West, everything looks clearer, but is it?). And this – process of dissidence, of making a global reach –  has been happening for a long time.
I’ll give 2 examples spanning 40 years
Artist collective no.w.here. Their practise opens up the artist idea, in fact in destroying the institutional confinement around the concept they’ve opened up a much wider filed for many more people. They are nomads, mediators, facilitators, instigators, information givers. The point is that they also ask question of their ‘audience’: what is this role of ‘audience’?. www.no.w.here.org.uk
Film Poster Collective a group working in London in the ‘70’s. This is a poster they (we) made in the mid – ‘70’s in response to the Chilean coup, but it also resonates in Argentina and Brazil.  What it says is still true, or more true, or differently true. But it’s also an object, a poster, made at a specific time. What is important is how you read it, and what you do in the process of ‘reading’.

2. Do we not each share in the responsibility of finding ways to be creative destroyers, in the service value, like: love and truth, wisdom and compassion and/or the joyful flourishing of the human spirit of that which we, in harmony with all that is, and of a justice for all that, against the odds, may one day come to be? (Whew…long sentence!)
This is a question about what we value. Leon wants to cut through all the mechanisms of self-protection to some kind of dynamic essence.  The non-I, the erasure of a certain idea of the self, is linked to Zen and Buddhism and that specific training, focus, belief.  The problem I have is about the religious element. I hate all religion, I feel every ray of divine light also casts a shadow somewhere, I feel like Philip Pullman, that when it comes down to it, every religion consists of a group of old men who will never give up their power, telling people what they can’t do. But I also know my response is fundamentally emotional and reactive. After all, there’s a branch of the Quakers who don’t believe in any form of God at all, and there are levels of Zen that are still shut off from me, that I can’t even imagine. I haven’t really thought it through.
So I would hope to destroy this reactive, conditioned set of responses – maybe a kind of ‚self‘ if you like- to give myself the opportunity to perceive my surroundings and the people around me in new ways,  to experience some kind of level of awareness beyond the conditioned self. And within that, I’m aware there’s an element of healing.