The art of demolition
The notorious 19th-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who proclaimed that “the urge for destruction is also a creative urge,” has found an unlikely disciple in Trump. Considered together, the 1980 and 2025 episodes teach the lesson that destruction can be a form of authorship. Once the reliefs were gone, their loss defined both the building and its destroyer. The erasure became his signature. Between McFadden’s 1980 account of jackhammers and Broadwater’s 2025 image of roaring machinery there stretches a single, continuous story about the aesthetics of demolition.
