defacing art as itself art: well, not new, but exploring new problems in aesthetic criminality. i'd have to say that much of modernism and post-modernism has been dedicated to iconoclasm of one sort or another.even the basic move to abstraction has that element. but hostility toward art is a basic element of, say, dada, pop, conceptualism, jeff koons. or we might ponder rauschenberg's "erased de kooning":
