The dodgy world of posthumous art works

What does an artist do with work that isn’t quite up to his or her standards? Throw it out? Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg both tried that, putting artworks they didn’t like out with the trash, only to find them on sale in galleries a few years later. Some artists preemptively destroy works they don’t like. ‘There’s enough bad art in the world,’ Indiana painter Charles Mundy said. ‘I want to spare the public bad art, especially if it’s mine.’ The solution for most artists is just to keep their misfires in storage, which only postpones a decision.

The question becomes trickier when the artists are dead, and a current exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art of images by street photographer Garry Winogrand (1928-84) offers a real poser. Perhaps one-quarter of the images on view were developed from rolls of film that Winogrand used but never developed. They just sat in storage until curators going through the artist’s archives decided to develop a portion of them (there were 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film), and the curator of this exhibition, Leo Rubinfien, chose to exhibit quite a few.