Whose belief should take precedence?

According to an article in the February 24, 2013 issue of The New York Times (“Buddhists, Reconstructing Sacred Tibetan Murals, Wield Their Brushes in Nepal”, by Edward Wong), the American Himalayan Foundation is financing a project to restore the art work in two of the main religious buildings in Lo Manthong, Nepal. While the Project Director is Luigi Fieni, an Italian conservator, it is thirty-five local residents who are doing the work which includes painting new images on sections of the walls from which the original images are missing. Scholars of Tibertan art assert that the new painting alters important historical murals and is jeopardizing scholarship, while people involved in the project argue that local worshippers want to have complete art works and not ruins in their temples. Whose belief should take precedence?

A very long conservation project

According to The New York Times article, “As One Renaissance Door Closes, Others Open” (by Elisabetta Povoledo, February 23, 2013), thirty years after it was begun the conservation of the rooms in the second floor apartment of the Pontifical Palace (Vatican City) decorated by Raphael has been completed. Many insights into Raphael’s working methods in fresco have come out of the project. Only Professor Arnold Nesselrath of the Vatican Museums was able to stay with the project for the duration. If more members of the original team had been part of the project for all thirty years would long term dedication and study have produced even more insights? Or, was it new team members bringing new outlooks and approaches which led to the important discoveries?

A unique material for a study of damage and aging

According to Allan Kozinn’s February 23, 2013 article in The New York Times, “A Plain White Square and Yet So Fascinating“, the exhibit, “We Buy White Albums” (on view at Recess Gallery, 41 Grand Street, New York City through March 9, 2013), is an installation of several hundred examples of the Beatles’ “The White Album” which were collected by Rutherford Chang. For those who are too young to know the record firsthand, the one color album cover was embossed with the title and each album carried a unique serial number. In the article, Chang is quoted as saying, “I was interested in the different ways that covers aged. Being an all white cover, the changes are apparent.” Back in 1968 when the album was first released, who would have thought of its cover as material for the study of damage and aging of paper.

What does it mean when an insurance company says that a damaged work of art no longer exists

In the December 24 &31, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead wrote a Talk of the Town piece, “Zombie Art” about The Salvage Art Institute’s exhibit in the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University called “No Longer Art” and a related symposium (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lX9vW47sKs ) bringing considerable exposure to the category of “dead” or “salvage” art— i.e., damaged works of art for which the cost of conservation would be greater than the amount for which the works are insured. These works are therefore rendered as total losses by insurance companies and are sent to warehouses to live in limbo. In terms of the art market they no longer exist. However, they do exist physically and could be restored, raising existential ethical questions which conservators might well contemplate.

A forthcoming lecture on historic ceramic repair techniques

Image: Historic Deerfield, Inc.Mended china, like this 1700s English plate, will be the topic of a talk at the New York Ceramics Fair.
Image: Historic Deerfield, Inc.
Mended china, like this 1700s English plate, will be the topic of a talk at the New York Ceramics Fair.

According to the January 18, 2013 “Antiques” column of The New York Times (“It’s as Good as Glue: Mending Shattered China“, by Eve M. Kahn), a small chapter in the history of conservation will be presented to the public at the New York Ceramics Fair on January 23, 2013. Angelika Kuettner, Associate Registrar for Collections Documentation and Imaging and Assistant Curator of Ceramics at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation will speak on “Simply Riveting: A Look at Broken and Mended Cermaics”, detailing the use of twine, metal and glue in the repair of fine china in the 18th and 19th century.

What will become of video art when there is no one let who can restore it?

According to a profile in the Wall Street Journal (“An Archivist Still Wired for Analog“, by Steve Dollar, December 22-23, 2012), seventy-one year old Chi-tien Lui, owner of CTL Electronics in the TriBeCa section of New York City since 1968, is one of the few people who still has the skills and knowledge required to restore video sculptures like those created by Nam June Paik from the 1960s until his death in 2006 (many of which are now on display in a retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum).
It is unrealistic to expect conservation training programs to devote much course time to such a small and specialized group of art works. What will become of these works when replacement equipment is no longer available and Mr. Lui and his few colleagues are not here to execute custom modifications to the equipment that is?

Would any conservation program have accepted her as a student?

Dr. Miriam Clavir, conservator emerita of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology recently published “Insinuendo“, a fun mystery novel which is one of the rare works of conservation fiction that presents conservation work as it really is. However, with the intense competition for places in the few North American conservation graduate programs, one wonders if protagonist Berry Cates would really have been accepted to any of them when, wanting/needing a chance of life after her husband walked out on her, she decided to study conservation.

Good Public Outreach Rendered Silly

The December 7, 2012 issue of The Wall Street Journal contained a small feature (“Pondering Pollock, by Ellen Gamerman) about the Getty Center/University of Iowa Museum of Art study of Jackson Pollock’s 1943 painting, “Mural”. Gamerman explained how investigators are using tools like microscopy, x-radiography, and lasers to discern Pollock’s working method. The positive impact of the piece is undermined by the accompanying (most likely staged) photograph featuring the rumps of two Getty officials, an artist, and a conservation scientist as the men bend over to examine the painting and by the mention of the fact that, while conservators have been known to spot clean paintings with their saliva, they could not have used the technique on this painting because it is eight feet by twenty feet in size.

A Timely Response Is Everything As Sometimes It’s Too Late to Salvage Damaged Works of Art

Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Workers cleaned out a sculpture studio on Friday in the basement of Westbeth Artists Housing in West Village, which was heavily damaged by flooding during Hurricane Sandy.

That there are limits to the ability to salvage large numbers of drowned art works was brought to the public’s attention by Christopher Maag in his New York Times article, “Lifetimes of Artworks Destroyed at Artists’ Colony” (December 8, 2012). Maag wrote about the many artists in the Westbeth Artists Housing development who lost years of their work in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy when, due to safety concerns, they were not allowed to go down into the flooded basement where the works were stored until nine days after the storm by which time the works were in such a bad state that they had to be trashed.