Category: Conservation in the News

With the California wildfires coming close to the Getty Center, in the December 14, 2017 edition of The New York Times, John Schwartz looked at how the Getty was fairing (“Getty Stands Up to Flames” ). What he found was a complex built of fire-resistant materials, decorated with fire-resistant vegetation that is kept carefully pruned, as well as a system of irrigation pipes and sprinklers. A safe museum collection isn’t a lucky accident. It’s planned for.

Thanks to Claire Voon’s November 2, 2017 Hyperallergic article (“Photographing Museum Visitors Behaving Badly”), I now know about Stefan Drashan’s project to photograph museum visitors touching artworks. Conservators (and others who care about the safety of works of art) who wish to cringe should visit Drashan’s website.

Alexandra S. Levine’s article about the conservation of maps in the New York City Municipal Archives (“Delicate Job for ‘Dry Cleaners’: Revitalizing the Maps that Bind the City to its Past” , The New York Times, September 12, 2017) is very informative about the processes and procedures that the conservators use to treat fragile maps which have been rolled up and stored in less than ideal conditions for decades. However, she chose to use the conservators’ in-joke that they are “dry cleaners” in her opening paragraph and the headline writer followed suit. Should we be more careful about how we describe ourselves and our work to non-conservators? Do we give the public a wrong message when we call ourselves “dry cleaners”?

According to an article by Zephira Davis in the August 13, 2017 issue of The New York Times (“An Icon of Communism is Restored in England” ), due to the efforts of artist Phil Collins who is using it in a project, a statue of Friedrich Engels has been erected in Manchester, England where Engels conducted his research on the working class. The statue, originally erected in the eastern Ukraine, had been torn down and cut in half after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Now it is restored and sitting in front of the HOME Theater. What does this say about the possibility of an afterlife for a disgraced artwork?

In New York City every day, free newspapers are given away by the hundreds of thousands in subway stations and in free- standing newspaper boxes on the street. Small (no more than 20 pages with many advertisements), their contents can be (and are) read from cover to cover on a short commute to work. An article in any one issue reaches a large and varied audience. I was therefore very pleased to read Lisa Colangelo’s “Monumental Mission” about the Citywide Monuments Conservation program overseen by the NYC Parks Department in the July 31, 2017 issue of amNewYork. Discussing kinds of damages to and treatments for outdoor monuments, it provided a glimpse into conservation for many people who probably knew nothing about the subject .

Does the casual museum visitor seeing an enormous, heavy work of art think about how it got to where it is and how it stays in place? And if he or she does, who can provide the answers to those questions? Brenda Cronin, writing in the July 25. 2017 issue of The Wall Street Journal about the installation of a 28 foot tall painting by Cristobal de Villalpando in a show at the Metropolitan Museum (“ The Met’s 28-Foot-Tall Visitor”) provides the answers for this one work. All it takes is sixteen riggers, machinists, carpenters and technicians; multiple scissor lifts; 16,000 pounds of sand;dress rehearsals; and five days of work.

Each morning I search The New York Times and Wall Street Journal for conservation related news. However, it was not until this morning when I read the July 18, 2017 issue of Hyperallergic that I learned of the damaging flooding in the Louvre, the National Library of France, and the French Ministry of Culture’s main storage facilities caused by extremely heavy rains on July 9th (“ Flooding Damages Three Paintings and Multiple Rooms at the Louvre”). Just over a year ago, the Louvre and Musee d’Orsay suffered damage when heavy rains caused the Seine to overflow. The second flood damaging Parisian museums in two years would seem worthy of a mention in the Times or WSJ. Perhaps with all of the damage to the cultural heritage that has been caused by human action over the past two years, a second ( but limited) natural disaster doesn’t seem that newsworthy. Now if the Mona Lisa had been damaged…

In the July 14, 2017 issue of The New York Times, Sopan Deb reported (“Oops! A Gallery Selfie Gone Wrong Causes $200,000 in Damage” ) that a visitor taking a selfie caused considerable damage to a number of pieces in a show at 14th Factory in Los Angeles when, striving for a better photo, she got too close to a pedestal, lost her balance, and set a row of pedestals with art works on top crashing down domino style. There have been a number of prior art museum and gallery selfie mishaps. Short of confiscating cell phones (and cameras) from visitors, an institution would be hard pressed to eliminate the practice of taking selfies Pedestals and art works can be secured. Barriers and do not cross floor markings can be installed. People will take selfies. Why not be prepared?

In a May 12, 2017 New York Times article by Mike Ives ( “Quake Propels Competing Visions for Restoring Myanmar’s Temples”) about what should be done to restore the Buddhist temples in Bagan, Myanmar—many of which have a checkered conservation past, he notes that the archaeology department has made the decision not to rebuild damaged spires. U Thay Zaniya, a monk is quoted as saying, “In our Buddhist tradition, not having a top on a temple is like having a person without a head. It’s a disgraceful sight.” If the Buddhist position has equal validity to the archaeology department’s position, is there any way that these two seemingly opposing philosophies can be reconciled?