The destruction of art

Abstract

Chapter one surveys examples from news articles, books, and exhibitions that take the destruction of art as their starting point, and attempts to gather these approaches and accounts as a framework for the book. Solvent form looks to recent examples such as critic Jonathan Jones’s concept of a Museum of Lost Art—a place where all the destroyed and lost artworks might hang—poet Henri Lefebvre’s book The Missing Pieces, the Tate Modern’s recent virtual exhibition Gallery of Lost Art, as well as literary parallels taken from Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Georges Perec’s character Bartlebooth in Life A User’s Manual. From here, it considers Georges Bataille’s concept of the negative miracle from The Accursed Share in relation to thoughts from Giorgio Agamben and Paul Virilio, while providing examples such as Rachel Whiteread’s House, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, and Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York.