Most definitely not if you have them destroyed like T.P.
What was even your point about "someone's curated image"? Was that supposed to go somewhere or are you planning to impart pieces of your wisdom one statement at a time, hoping people will extrapolate some sort of argument in the most charitable manner?
I really cannot be bothered, especially since it seems like we're just splitting hairs here and arguing about definitions.
Your legacy is by definition everything that you leave behind. If you wrote a book that went unpublished and you didn't completely destroy it then it's part of your legacy by default and it doesn't "taint" it if it gets rediscovered. What might get "tainted" is the public image you wanted to uphold, which is made of a subset (usually small) of your legacy.
The point is that refusing to publish a work because it might "taint" someone's legacy is the same as refusing to public a historical academic paper because some new findings you discovered might "taint" some medieval king's legacy. You're not tainting anything, you're just uncovering more truth and more details which will be useful to future people to reach their own conclusions.
Some king's correspondence is very much not the same thing as literary works produced by a writer. That's a completely disingenuous argument. These things document historical fact. They're generally not art.
However adding to an artist's/writer's oeuvre without their consent is no better than changing the works themselves. You might as well be painting over things or change passages willy-nilly.
Additionally our social contract mandates that relatives and other trustees faithfully execute any reasonable last wishes of the deceased. If my sons disrespected my wishes like that, they might as well write "fuck you dad" in my epitaph. Historians years later are bound by no such thing and their insults would mean very little.
>Some king's correspondence is very much not the same thing as literary works produced by a writer.
It is in the context of being a historical fact.
>You might as well be painting over things or change passages willy-nilly.
Non sequitur. Adding a book to a bibliography does not change the content of the books that have come before.
You seem to confuse historical importance with artistic importance. If I only want to read Marquez's good books I will not read this last unofficial one. If I am a student writing a PhD dissertation about him I absolutely want every single fact I can get my hands on. Original sketches are extremely important in every subfield of history: from poetry to literature to music to painting. Many things we have from past artists are private and yet fundamental for understanding their life and their craft.
> It is in the context of being a historical fact.
And if someone chooses to have all of their work destroyed, then that is their history. In any case "public interest" outweighs a person's personal wishes only in very rare exceptions such as statesmanship. Here it clearly doesn't.
> Non sequitur. Adding a book to a bibliography does not change the content of the books that have come before.
Only in the same way that a later chapter in a book doesn't "change" the ones that came before. It changes how the previous works are perceived - art is all about perception.
> If I am a student writing a PhD dissertation about him I absolutely want every single fact I can get my hands on.
There's little reason to care about any unpublished books, because they cannot have had any influence. It's fine to be interested in them anyways, but mere interest of the living is not enough to excuse any of this.
But even if the person who wishes to have their works destroyed gave a completely nonsensical reason, their executors still would not have the right to go against it.
If people cannot expect to have their wishes honored, they will merely take more extreme measures to ensure they leave things behind to their liking. Nowadays that likely means encrypted drives and dead man's switches. But do we really have to go there? Can we maybe instead just expect society to behave honorably?
> Original sketches are extremely important in every subfield of history: from poetry to literature to music to painting.
The word "important" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It is very important to my daily commute that there be a highway from my front door going straight to my place of work, but I don't think it's going to happen.
