What do you do when you don’t want your work to be salvaged? After finding people rummaging through his trash in search of his discarded paintings, figurative artist Francis Bacon started slashing his paintings so that they may be irrecoverable. Hundreds of his paintings were found cut and destroyed. What leads an artist to use violence against his own art? How does an artist decide which painting is worthy of keeping and which is not? His 1962 painting Gorilla With Microphones was one of these paintings to be violently discarded. To continue our conversation on what art is or whether AI art is real art or not, today we explore what makes art worthy of being kept, and what type of art is to be violently cut up and thrown away.

Content produced by: Shawn Grenier | The Canvas