{"id":971,"date":"2011-06-10T21:02:16","date_gmt":"2011-06-11T02:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.conservators-converse.org\/?p=971"},"modified":"2011-06-10T21:02:16","modified_gmt":"2011-06-11T02:02:16","slug":"swabbing-away-the-varnish-in-the-basement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/2011\/06\/10\/swabbing-away-the-varnish-in-the-basement\/","title":{"rendered":"Swabbing away the varnish in the basement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When one is reading a work of fiction not specifically concerned with\u00a0art conservation or conservators, one\u00a0sometimes comes across a casual description that seems to set back the public image of the field by decades. The most recent\u00a0one I encountered\u00a0came early\u00a0in Michael Cunningham&#8217;s 2010 novel, <em>By Nightfall<\/em>. Peter, an art dealer, mulling over his career, says to himself :\u00a0&#8220;He&#8217;s an art history guy, maybe he should have become &#8230;what? &#8230; a conservator, say, one of those museum-basement people who spend their lives swabbing away the varnish and overpaint, reminding themselves (and eventually the world) that the past was garish and bright&#8230;&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 With all of the thoughtful coverage that conservation projects have received in the popular press,\u00a0\u00a0hadn&#8217;t we thought that the field\u00a0had\u00a0once and for all come above ground in the public&#8217;s mind .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When one is reading a work of fiction not specifically concerned with\u00a0art conservation or conservators, one\u00a0sometimes comes across a casual description that seems to set back the public image of the field by decades. The most recent\u00a0one I encountered\u00a0came early\u00a0in Michael Cunningham&#8217;s 2010 novel, By Nightfall. Peter, an art dealer, mulling over his career, says &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/2011\/06\/10\/swabbing-away-the-varnish-in-the-basement\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Swabbing away the varnish in the basement&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[285],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news","tag-conservation-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}