Art Appreciation: The Destruction of Art by artists, institutions, and conflicts

How does art get destroyed?, who destroys it and why? are questions this course attempts to answer whether they be by artists, institutions, or governments, wilfully, accidentally, or deliberately. There have been many cases down the centuries of works of art being deliberately destroyed by famous artists, such as Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, who have at different times destroyed their work. Whilst contemporary artists, such as Cornelia Parker, Yoko Ono, Bansky, Michael Landy, destroy artworks as part of their practice. By employing an array of techniques, they rip it, burn it, melt it, tear it, cut it, or shred it. Similar to the techniques that vandals, activists, and protesters have used to damage famous artworks in museums. The most famous of these being by, iconoclasts, suffragettes, Black Lives Matter protesters, and climate change activists. Sometimes it is simply a matter of the cleaners accidentally removing what they think is rubbish from the museum. But the greatest destruction of art is because of wars, conflicts, civil wars, and invasions - World War II, Afghan Civil War, Middle East conflicts, and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, when artworks are indiscriminately destroyed with no regard to their cultural value.