The public and performative destruction of art seems to be having a bit of a moment. In the last three weeks alone, Just Stop Oil protesters have thrown tins of tomato soup over a Van Gogh painting in London (albeit a glass-covered one); a separate group of climate activists has hurled mashed potato at a Monet in Potsdam; and artist Damien Hirst has burnt hundreds of his own artworks after buyers chose to hold them virtually as NFTs instead. So in vogue does this trend seem to be, in fact, that Britain’s Channel 4 last week aired a programme called Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, which it described as a “unique TV experiment where the audience decides whether to cancel controversial artists and offensive artworks”, hosted by a comedian who himself is no stranger to controversy.

The reviews were universally terrible — “the stupidest take on cancel culture yet” — but I seem to have been a little more sympathetically disposed to it. The programme was certainly crass, not least because of the jarring asymmetry in the list of “problematic artists” whose work the audience was asked to save or to destroy — Pablo Picasso, Rachel Donezal, and?.?.?.?Adolf Hitler. But I think it marks a cultural moment, and as such has value and should be considered worthy of preservation — just as artworks and other historical artefacts should be.

The vandalism of works of art is of course nothing new. Hitler himself was a fan of destroying art he considered “unGerman” or “degenerate”. But whether you love or loathe the phrase “cancel culture”, it is hard to argue that we are not living through an era of heightened censoriousness. So having a conversation on primetime TV about the extent to which we should separate art from the artist, and whether we should preserve the works, is worthwhile.