Wrote Arnold Schoenberg (in “Problems in Teaching Art”):
“Is technique a cause or an effect, a by-product? Expressive content wishes to make itself understood; its upheaval produces a form. A volcano erupts, the devastation makes an ornamental effect; a steam-kettle explodes, and the objects it strews around fall at points one could exactly calculate on the basis of relationships of tension, weights, distances and resistances. One can, however, also lay the same objects out, so that they imitate an explosion’s sense of order… But, there is a difference … whether an ornament has as its author the explosion of a steam-kettle or the arranging hand of an interior decorator.”