Or destruction can symbolize a fresh start. For a 1970 piece titled “Cremation Project,” a 39-year-old John Baldessari — then teaching at the University of California, San Diego, and taking his art in a new direction, away from his earlier paintings — gathered a group of his students to help him destroy all of his unsold canvases from May 1953 to March 1966 that were still in his possession. After tearing and breaking apart the works, they brought them to a local mortuary to have them cremated. As the editors of Baldessari’s catalogue raisonné have noted, this act was “as much practical as therapeutic.” The reason for destroying can indeed be banal, but no less solid: The artist was preparing to move to Los Angeles for a teaching job at California Institute of the Arts, and he didn’t want to haul more than 100 old paintings that he didn’t like anymore with him. But the symbolic weight of this act is undeniable. Baldessari, now 87, keeps some of the ashes of these works in a book-shaped urn that is part of his collection, a reminder that at any point in a career, one can burn it down and begin again.

IT IS NOW standard for “early work” to become a pejorative term for artists who are lucky enough to achieve a long career. Saul Bellow dismissed his first two novels, “Dangling Man” (1944) and “The Victim” (1947), as mere apprentice works, a kind of throat-clearing exercise in preparation for his masterpiece “The Adventures of Augie March” (1953). After she became famous, Georgia O’Keeffe bought back and destroyed several paintings that she felt had been damaged or altered by their owners, often through cleaning or conservation. (One early piece, a 1916 watercolor called “Red and Green II,” was long thought destroyed before appearing at a Christie’s auction in 2015.) Gerhard Richter destroyed several paintings from the early 1960s, including two depicting scenes of naval warfare, made while he was living in West Germany and trying to shed his roots as a Socialist Realist painter. He left these works out of his catalogue raisonné because they were not representative of his work.

This attempt by a living artist to control a posthumous legacy is like serving as the artistic director for one’s own funeral. (At least one contemporary artist, Marina Abramovic, a healthy 72, has in fact published detailed instructions for her funeral, which will involve three coffins in three different cities — only one of them containing her real body — and Anohni singing “My Way.” Even in death, artists are controlling.) The effort to police one’s post-mortem career might appear like a contemporary phenomenon. The art industrial complex will buy and sell whatever scraps are available if one isn’t careful: A 1999 300-word blog post for Salon about “five direly underappreciated U.S. novels” was reprinted in David Foster Wallace’s 2012 posthumous collection “Both Flesh and Not.” And works today are rarely truly lost: Anyone with an internet connection can gain access to that exceptional portrait of the artist as a bumbling young nerd.

Indeed, I sometimes can’t help lying awake at night, fully insecure in the knowledge that somewhere in the bowels of the internet exist several articles I wrote for my college newspaper. But despite our growing online record of cultural mediocrity, artists have been destroying their work for at least as long as people have been buying it. Audiences like the idea of a fully formed genius at least as much as the artists themselves. But the artist who seems to have simply arrived one day intact is often a disguise: In 1957, before her arrival in New York from Taos, N.M., as a Minimalist master of canvases in stark gray, the Canadian artist Agnes Martin had burned many of her early landscape paintings, erasing much of that history, and thus becoming herself.

ONE OF THE EARLIEST known instances of an artist attempting to destroy his work comes from the 16th century, when Michelangelo partially defaced a marble Pietà. For reasons now lost to history, he hammered into Christ’s left leg and arm, destroying them before walking away from the work unfinished. (Theories for this range from Michelangelo’s frustration with the quality of marble to his fear of being exposed as a Protestant sympathizer in the midst of the Roman Inquisition.) Simple frustration has relegated a great deal of important work to history’s dustbin. Claude Monet threw out a number of his works in the latter half of his career. In 1908, dissatisfied with a series of waterlily paintings he was working on for an upcoming exhibition — and perhaps worried about his relevance in the face of a younger generation that included Pablo Picasso — he destroyed 15 of them, happier to see the works ruined than to face public scrutiny.