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by drekk 1124 days ago
If you live in the US you can do that, and you can and will be prosecuted under the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA). Other industrialized nations tend to have similar protections. People always have the choice to break the law, and if you go so far as to do something irreversible (like burn an original Picasso) a jury of your peers might not be so understanding of your god-granted individual liberty to be a Vandal.
2 comments

Seeing as Picasso passed away long ago, presumably there would be nobody to prosecute me under VARA[1].

[1]: "In most instances, the rights granted under VARA persist for the life of the author (or the last surviving author, for creators of joint works)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Artists_Rights_Act

To my reading VARA only applies to living artists