UNDOING ART

Where as a wealth of critics have diagnosed contemporary arts preoccupations with madness, and self-abuse, as well as its tendency t o cultivate an (anti-)aesthetics of the negative, the excremental, and the abject, much less attention has been paid to how modern a rtists and publics have thrived on the destruction, disfiguration, and obliteration of work by the artists and/or by that of others.