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March 27, 2015 – Review
“Destroy, she said”
Alan Gilbert
As capitalism solidifies into a global religion, iconoclasm—traditionally defined as the destruction of sacred artifacts—accordingly shifts its tactics, where it doesn’t become coopted. However inadvertent it may have been, the last notable iconoclastic act in Europe—“Beast Jesus,” an elderly Spanish woman’s attempt in 2012 to improve, while in fact defacing, a fresco portrait of its namesake—created a cash cow for the various parties involved. A more secular brand of iconoclasm in contemporary art has its famous examples—whether Tony Shafrazi spray-painting Pablo Picasso’s Guernica in 1974 or a 2006 hammer attack on Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain by a self-proclaimed Dadaist—that go alongside more conceptually oriented versions such as Robert Rauschenberg’s erasing of a Willem de Kooning drawing in 1953.
Just as every system contains the seeds of its own destruction, iconoclasm has erupted from within the current art world and even artworks themselves in response to their hyper-commoditization over the past decade or so. Recent projects have begun to address this at times literal fracturing of art as commodity object. Elka Krajewska’s Salvage Art Institute, which makes an appearance in Ben Lerner’s widely touted 2014 novel 10:04, presents works of art that have been rendered valueless (in some cases temporarily) because of damage …