Letting Our Masterpieces Go to Pieces

In recent years art conservation has emerged as a fast-growing industry. Graduate schools across the country now offer programs in the field. Without conservation work, we would not be able to enjoy masterpieces like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the pyramids in Egypt, or many of the beautiful buildings right here in Boston. But something about altering the works we hold most precious for the sake of preventing future alteration seems counterintuitive.

Not long ago I was watching a museum’s educational video on their conservation methods when the image of a man happily layering new paint atop an ancient masterpiece as he spoke casually with the film team made me cringe.

As a whole, it seems that the international museum community has deemed conservation a worthy, even principal, goal. Voices of dissent make arguments that focus on staying true to the methods and materials originally used by the artist, but no one questions the fundamental philosophy behind such work. Realistically, I admit that this is a practical stance to take, not least because “anti-conservationist” is a far from positive, desirable label. But there’s something to be said for the opposite argument—for letting nature run its course, even on art. Whether this makes me “anti-conservationist” or not I leave to the reader to decide.

I would argue that what we are really doing when we decide to restore a work of art is refusing to acknowledge the inalterable passage of time. We seek to encapsulate what works of art we deem worthy in airless, isolated bubbles, all for the sake of preserving them for the future. This is the very essence of the modern museum; the blank sterility of so many of our art galleries proves that we sometimes preserve art to the point that it becomes harder to appreciate it.

For example, the prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux have long been closed to the public due to concerns about the acceleration of their deterioration. Like an expensive shirt that remains hanging in the closet because a worthy situation never arises, this kind of “preserved” art forces us to ask ourselves what we are waiting for. As we plan for a vaguely conceptualized, indefinite future, we deny ourselves measurable benefits in the present.

Why do we feel the need to preserve these objects exactly as they are now? Moreover, why can’t we accept that they will never remain exactly the same, no matter what we do to them?

In many ways, our obsession with preservation is just a reflection of our own attempts to deny the unstoppable effects of time. One day in the future, our works will be reduced to dust and forgotten—and this is terrifying. The situation stems from the same culture that maintains a multimillion-dollar cosmetic industry for anti-aging face creams. The term “face-lift” is even applied frequently to building restoration projects. Such a mindset detracts from the pure visual enjoyment of these masterpieces; worse, it injects a sense of collective, primal fear into our response to those masterworks.

Robert Smithson, the artist who created the famous Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, was well known for his alternative approach to art conservation. He defied convention by maintaining that works of art are given life by their creators and then sent into the world to exist by themselves, without warranting future involvement on our part. There is something very calming about this outlook on art. Fear is replaced by time-worn appreciation, the same feeling we get from an oft-used shirt, a well-lived life. The struggle against time is an ill-chosen fight, because in the end we will always, undoubtedly, lose. Maybe if we could let this outlook seep into our conservation efforts in the smallest of ways, we could gain something intangible which even the most faithful restoration could never provide. Maybe it is our ability to appreciate works of art for what they are, and not the works of art themselves, that is most in need of restoration.

­­—Columnist Sofie C. Brooks can be reached at sbrooks@fas.harvard.edu.