Metzger's Till we have built Jerusalem, 1998. Photograph: Land Konsthal, Lund
Art. In general, you'll want to keep hold of it. After all, doesn't art originate partly from the desire to preserve - an image, an experience, an emotion - in the interests of binding a community with a common thread?
Running through its history, however, is a frequently revisited concern with destruction and decay. The Romantics' obsession with ruins, ghosts luminous from their contact with a long-since impossible past; or the conceptualists' fixation with the disposable. Or think of Robert Rauschenberg's celebrated Erased De Kooning, which consists quite literally of a rubbed-out drawing by the Dutch-American abstract expressionist.
But rarely does the instinct for artistic annihilation come any better developed than in the work of Gustav Metzger, visionary behind the school of Auto-Destructive Art.
Metzger, whose more famous disciples included the guitar-smashing Pete Townshend, became famous in the late 50s and 60s for his work and series of manifestos, arguing that art should react with an imagery and violence appropriate to the chaos of capitalist consumption, and to the then widely-perceived self-destructive drive manifest in nuclear arms capability.
A couple of years ago, famously, the auto-destruction function of one Metzger piece, on show in London, didn't move fast enough for the gallery's conscientious janitor, who helped the work - which consisted of a bin-liner filled with wastepaper - on its way by placing it in the trash.
But Metzger, now 80 years of age, has found that his rubbish has a return value after all. At a presentation last night at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Polish-Jewish born artist received a £30,000 award for his services from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards, a grant-giving trust that funds arts and community projects of benefit to the disadvantaged.
No argument that Metzger is a deserving recipient, then; for what greater disadvantage could an artist have than that of having his work destroyed before it could be sold?
