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Ever wonder why Mary is so venerated in the Catholic and Orthodox faiths? Well, among many other reasons, it's because Byzantine emperors tried to prevent that veneration in the form of statues and icons—the original iconoclasm.
Proclaiming Mary, Queen of Heaven or Queen of Universe was a direct challenge to the legitimacy of an emperor's big-spending wife. Mary is queen, you're not.
This, as you might imagine, was not popular with the powers that be. Along with the challenge presented by icon-averse Muslims, Leo III decided to ban veneration of images.
It was opposed strongly by the church, partly because it called into question their previous understanding of faith, partly as an assertion of independence. It was also opposed by the poor of the empire. The controversy was about power. y'all.
The same is true when the roles flip in the Reformation. There's an element of faith in Protestant churches whitewashing murals and removing/destroying religious statues. But there's also an element of power: we're not paying for your damn decorations anymore.
Okay, one more. Ever wonder why so many ancient Egyptian statues have broken noses, or faces ruined?
The ancient Egyptians believed that statues or other images of a person had the power to confer (or at least help sustain) life after death. So to smash a statue's nose was to prevent it from breathing was to essentially kill it, and the person it represented.
When regimes changed, or politics shifted, it was often useful to the new powers to assert the old ones had passed away, therefore the iconoclasm.
Any form of art asserts power, to shape and even enact reality, and reflects the dynamics of power in the society in which it was created, and ultimately, in which it is destroyed.
If you don't get why protestors are going hogwild on memorials to the Confederacy, stop and ask yourself a simple question: why did the Allies dynamite the swastika hovering over the assembly grounds in Nuremberg?
It ain't because they thought the view was prettier without it.
It ain't because they thought the view was prettier without it.
