> My toddler daughter once “ruined” a Mathew Barney work on a wall - it was a smear of black jelly that she smeared some more. That's a great story and gave me

> My toddler daughter once “ruined” a Mathew Barney work on a wall - it was a smear of black jelly that she smeared some more. That's a great story and gave me a good laugh. But with a lot of these pieces, there is a strong sense that the object isn't really the artwork, in the same way that a program isn't really the exact bits on my machine. Recently SFMOMA put up a Sol LeWitt, one of his "Wall Drawing" pieces, which involved some employee of the museum carefully painting it on the wall. At the end of the exhibit, the whole wall got painted back over. In my opinion (and that of the curators of SFMOMA), they weren't actually destroying a Sol LeWitt; the actual piece is something more abstract, including but not limited to the instructions used to paint it onto the wall. In the same way, most of the wall drawings of Matther Barney are about the act of drawing, not really the artifact that is the result: https://d2jv9003bew7ag.cloudfront.net/uploads/Matthew-Barney-Drawing-Restraint-5-documentation-still-photo-credits-Michael-Rees-image-courtesy-of-Gladstone-Gallery.jpg https://d2jv9003bew7ag.cloudfront.net/uploads/Matthew-Barney...