Art has already been destroyed for a long time. This sort of contemplation is fortunately obsolete.
Today, to organize the communal spectacle of the debris and copies of the debris -- Enrico Baj,[2] for example -- is no longer to destroy but to paste back together. It is to be the academic art of the era of the contemplation of art.
The situationists estimate that their own manner of surpassing art is the only good one: we will only suppress art practically by realizing it.
Obviously, we do not want to participate in any manner in a "symposium" in which the creativity and revolutionary position of all of the participants are not evident to us.
Guy Debord, Herbert Holl, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Rene Vienet[1] Gustav Metzger, honorary secretary of the DIAS (Destruction of Art Symposium [English in original]), soliciting the participation of the situationists in the first anticipated symposium, 9-11 September 1966, in London.
[2] Co-founder with Sergio Dangelo of the Nuclear Art Movement, then the co-founder with [Asger] Jorn of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, excluded in September 1956 from the Alba Congress, which consecrated this break with the following notice: "Cornered by precise facts, Baj left the Congress. He didn't make off with the cashbox."
(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 3, 1965-1968. Footnotes by Alice Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! August 2005.)