“ONE OF THE EARLIEST known instances of an artist attempting to destroy his work comes from the 16th century, when Michelangelo partially defaced a marble Pietà. For reasons now lost to history, he hammered into Christ’s left leg and arm, destroying them before walking away from the work unfinished. (Theories for this range from Michelangelo’s frustration with the quality of marble to his fear of being exposed as a Protestant sympathizer in the midst of the Roman Inquisition.)”
“Indeed, I sometimes can’t help lying awake at night, fully insecure in the knowledge that somewhere in the bowels of the internet exist several articles I wrote for my college newspaper. But despite our growing online record of cultural mediocrity, artists have been destroying their work for at least as long as people have been buying it. Audiences like the idea of a fully formed genius at least as much as the artists themselves. But the artist who seems to have simply arrived one day intact is often a disguise: In 1957, before her arrival in New York from Taos, N.M., as a Minimalist master of canvases in stark gray, the Canadian artist Agnes Martin had burned many of her early landscape paintings, erasing much of that history, and thus becoming herself.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/t-magazine/artists-destroy-past-work.html?unlocked_article_code=gh8NequPpb15C4_VW-xdyvoQecgU4RI37i06woGyDWJnCVOYfeveExelvBz3bjwuB5aVseMZG3MZ7kKE3mmQepamSSxEqAglizI9JehpGt-OPyKs3XR4a5afuytaW8_JeL4FxPKoNI8KkT1VHIeVeUvoPCCqyTbFHAGR0m_05W58aUEcVIk4SGfaW2KTNnlTq3Cq3cHvXSk12IScwa9k_KtXfOhf6wFaliwqcyMHRZs9CIk9F7TJb-W8SlG1oRxz4VNGZeKfuEcQJpc4HlmZl12dKlSjaf1h5Exjf8L6-3pf8seRuSRB2K8aRVlOFHpTmxuEDeIIW83DI5b95N32QrZxte3SmQ&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
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