There has been a movement for a long time, going back even to ancient civilizations finding things from ancient-to-them civilizations, to preserve art. But this is a faulty premise in its essence. Art is, in modern terms, a snapshot. A picture. It is a piece of its culture captured for only a moment. Without context, art is nothing or, even worse, something it was never intended to be. And as such, truly preserving it is impossible, and the act of such destroys the piece in a far more egregious manner than time ever could.
As an image for this post, I chose the Ecco Homo held in a sanctuary in Borja, Spain which was made famous for its faulty restoration. But while this is a literal destruction of a piece of art during an attempt at restoration, it isn’t at the heart of that of which I speak. Because this is what happens to the soul of a piece of art when you take it out of its cultural context. And in a more literal sense, this is what happens to art whenever we try to preserve it. There are few if any pieces of art from dead cultures on display that have not been restored to some extent. Ones open to the environment, like the roof of the Sistine Chapel, are regularly touched up to preserve what some new artist thinks they should look like. Every act of preservation is a reinterpretation, an adulteration using someone else’s skill to try and mimic the original. Which is, of course, impossible to truly do. And it creates a layer of falsehood that covers the original work and tarnishes its purity.
Rather, art is a symbol of its time, a culture that will inevitably fade. In accordance with this, the art itself too should fade and decay the same way that its context did, the culture it captured did, and the artist who made it did. Be that film or statuary, painting or architecture, the preservation of art is the violation of that same art. Returning to it outside of the context of its creation only causes us to misunderstand the piece, to project our modern sensibilities on it. Every time we observe a piece of art from a dead culture, we are doing with our minds what those who sandblasted the statues of ancient Rome and Greece did. We are forcing our sensibilities on them with no ability to truly understand what they once meant to the people for whom they were made.
Attempting to preserve art is only hastening its obliteration and creating obscene forgeries that claim to have the same value as their progenitor. Any piece which has been preserved, especially through restoration, gives those observing it now a false idea of what the piece truly was, in both the spiritual and material sense. But more egregiously, as art is an expression of an idea born of a person or people within a certain culture existing in a certain place at a certain time, as those elements are lost, the truth of the art is also lost, causing any attempt to preserve the piece just an extension of misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the artwork which can be twisted in uncountable ways. Therefore, art should not be preserved but rather allowed to die its noble death naturally as time and tide dictate.
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I disagree. How can we choose what is art and what isn’t? Similarly to the “death of the author”, we can identify as art what we think should be art as a collective. Then art could be anything we want to, and if not how could we help inspire the next generations to master and perfect it?
It’s like you remember a porn video decades later and you can’t find it anywhere, but for all kinds of art.
This boils down to:
It’s impossible to do something perfectly and we may even make it worse so we shouldn’t try.
Sure, it’s impossible to preserve a piece of art in such a way that those who experience it later also experience all of the context around that art. However, if the preservation process begins soon after the art is created, it is possible to document the relevant context and - to some extent - the artist’s intended meaning. Those who experience it later can learn if they want. There’s a chance art can go wrong (The creator of Pepe the Frog hates it’s use by the alt-right.) but all actions carry risk. We have to decide when the risk outweighs the benefits. I’m not sure how to strike that balance but I would presume it’s not always or never. It’s a sometimes kind of thing, which is why it requires care and attention by the original preservers.
I saw your comment that you are not arguing in good faith here, this is just a debate you picked. That’s fine.
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Is this ethical, informed trolling??
What a juicy contradiction.
(Don’t worry no post should be taken seriously here it is part of the exercise)
Arguing that preservation effectively destroys art and also arguing that we shouldn’t fight against it’s inevitable destruction pretty much leads to the conclusion that preserving art isn’t any worse and perhaps is actually better since it effectively becomes a new piece with the different interpretation of each successive generation. At least with preservation we keep getting new pieces.
Art is the study of choice; we are interested in the ideas that motivated various artistic choices. What makes a piece of art great is not the skill with which it conceives an intended subject, but the choices made along the way.
When we appreciate old art, beyond merely enjoying the skill employed in the object we look at the choices that tell the story of that time. We learn about other peoples in the reasons behind certain old conventions and the context in which they appeared. Why a certain man is shown with his hand in his shirt can deepen our understanding of history. Art restoration is therefore a historical endeavor and not an artistic one.
When we study history, each new generation creates a lens unique to their own values and worldview through which to evaluate the past. There is no correct lens per se, and there are ultimately no “fixed” histories that can be valid throughout time. Therefore it should be expected that in the study of ancient art objects, changes are made along the way to better preserve the ideas that drive the choices made by artists of antiquity.
QED we should refit the statue of David with a bigger plonker.
@WaltJRimmer I might argue that the preservation of art is partially about trying to understand the cultural context of its origins. Certainly one cannot understand the cultural context of an earlier time well without referencing the art that existed at the time, both the art that celebrated and the art that objects to that context. The only thing that illustrates the context better than art is humor, which does not survive to be preserved.
Ok Deidara.
