Aside from trading with another hero and giving him/her your artifacts, is there any other way you can discard artifacts?

In the expansion a map building called the Alchemist's Tower was introduced that would remove "cursed" artifacts from a hero (e.g. The Hideous Mask, Arm of the Martyr, etc). Aside from that and just trading them off to another hero there's no way to remove artifacts from your hero.

Ah damn, that's troublesome. What a bummer. Thanks.

However you have to pay there for each artifact removed, or am I confusing it with something else?

It can be a useful tactic sometimes to give a load of cruddy items to a new level 1 hero and send it on a suicide mission into enemy land capturing as many mines as possible before he is killed. On being killed, all those horrible items go into your enemy hero's possession. Let him suffer 250 gold taxes etc!

As far as I remember you're correct, you do have to pay for each artifact removed.

That's brilliant o.o ! I used to simply give them to a low level hero and then fire him...
BTW - think how hilarious it can be in multiplayer - everyone sending their cursed stuff back and forth xD ! Of course - the only sure way to "debuff" the enemy hero would be to first suicide into him and then attack him in the same turn... Which would give us the cursed item back -_-'.

Yes, that may be worth doing for things like the tax lien that penalize you all the time.
The exception would be that you give them items that give low morale and so on; then attack with a hero that has no spare equipment slots. He will defeat the weakened hero carrying crappy items, but won't take them off him because he can't carry any more. So they are efefctively 'destroyed'.