destruction vs. subversion of art

"Art seems compromised, historically, socially. Whence the effort on the part of the artist himself to destroy it."

...

"Unfortunately, this destruction is always inadequate; either it occurs outside the art, but thereby becomes impertinent, or else it consents to remain within the practice of the art, but quickly exposes itself to recuperation (the avant-garde is that restive language which is going to be recuperated). The awkwardness of this alternative is the consequence of the fact that destruction of discourse is not a dialectic term but a semantic term: it docilely takes its place within the great semiological "versus" myth (white versus black); whence the destruction of art is doomed to only paradoxical formulae (those which proceed literally against the doxa): both sides of the paradigm are glued together in an ultimately complicitous fashion: there is a structural agreement between the contesting and the contested forms.

(By subtle subversion I mean, on the contrary, what is not directly concerned with destruction, evades the paradigm, and seeks some other term: a third term, which is not, however, a synthesizing term but an eccentric, extraordinary term....)"


-- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller