“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