Ars longa, vita brevis -- but even art doesn't last forever. At least, not without a lot of help.

The ephemerality of art does, of course, depend on what you're doing. Performing arts are fleeting by nature: there's notation or (nowadays) recording, but when we talk about preserving something like music or dance, we tend to mean the art form as a whole, making sure there continue to be practitioners and audiences. In this sense it's much like a craft, where you need an ongoing series of teachers and students to inherit their wisdom -- which includes passing on the specific details of a song or a dance, an oral story or an epic poem, if you don't have a way of committing those to a more permanent medium. If that chain of transmission gets broken, then skills or entire works of art may be lost.

Physical art is more fixed, but that doesn't mean it's lasting. I've talked before about how much literature was destroyed after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire cut down on the availability of papyrus: that stuff isn't durable, and so anything written on it has to be copied and recopied, over and over again, as the original version decays. Many kinds of wood-pulp paper have a similar problem with acid; unless it's specially treated (acid-free paper), it succumbs to what's poetically known as "slow fire," gradually turning the paper more and more brittle until the slightest touch causes it to disintegrate. Modern science has ways to stabilize and de-acidify the paper, but for these kinds of artworks, "preservation" usually consists of continually making new copies, so that the content survives even if the container does not.

Some things you might think don't need conservation. Fired clay has survived for thousands of years; surely it's perfectly fine, right? Not necessarily. Depending on how the clay was treated, it may still contain salts that can expand and crack the material, even to the point of it disintegrating into useless fragments. Salt and other chemicals can also attack stone, accumulating either through rain (which is rarely entirely pure), through wind, or through dampness rising from the ground. Heat and cold also create stress on the stone which can lead to cracks: microscopic ones at first, but as the strain continues, and especially if those cracks are infiltrated by substances that expand and contract at different rates, entire pieces can break off. This is why so many ancient statues are missing noses, hands, and other protruding bits.

Even if it's less dramatic than that, weathering takes a gradual toll. Erosion from wind and water scrapes away infinitesimal layers of detail from the surface, year after year. Iron obviously rusts, but nearly any metal can corrode in one fashion or another -- sometimes damaging not only itself, but everything around it. Wooden elements not only rot but warp, placing stress on anything they connect to. Pigments fade and discolor, perhaps from the mere touch of light; textiles combine the vulnerabilities of those pigments with the brittleness and decay of organic material. Insects may eat away at artworks or lay their eggs within them; moss and lichen, while picturesque in their own way, hasten the breakdown of whatever they've latched onto. The list of potential sources of damage is nearly endless.

The cruelest twist is that sometimes we ourselves are the cause of the very problems we're trying to address. Our efforts to preserve great works of art go back for centuries, but our knowledge of how to do that well is much more recent. Past conservators have worked diligently to clean dirt and overgrowth off statues or paintings . . . not realizing that the cleansers they're using are causing other kinds of damage, especially once the long term comes into play. Maybe it looks fine in the moment, but it's actually dried out the paint so that later on it begins to crack and flake away from the canvas or panels beneath.

Our efforts to halt or reverse damage can likewise become part of the problem. Adding metal brackets to stabilize some work of stone may seem like a good idea, but their corrosion or warping can destroy what they were meant to protect. (This likely contributed to the collapse of Coventry Cathedral during the Blitz, as the fire heated the iron supports added by the Victorians.) And have you ever wondered why so many paintings by the Old Masters look dark and yellow? That's because at some point, some well-meaning person gave them a coat of varnish to protect the paint beneath -- and then, in the decades or centuries since then, the varnish has aged and collected dust, distorting the colors of the painting and obscuring finer details. You can see this in a video by Philip Mould that recently made the rounds of the internet, showing him cleaning away a thick layer of discolored varnish to reveal a startlingly vibrant portrait beneath.

And finally, conservation sometimes includes touching up the original -- but where the line is between "touching up" and "adding your own ideas" may be in the eye of the beholder. Quite a few classical sculptures you might see in Italy nowadays were actually found as fragments, with Renaissance artists hired to "restore" the missing portions according to their own vision -- look into the famous grouping Laocoön and His Sons to see the replacement right arm Laocoön was given, versus the one found later that seems to have been the original. A portrait of Isabella de' Medici in the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museum of Art was so thoroughly overpainted that the curator actually thought it was a modern fake; only upon X-ray examination did she find the original was holding an urn and had a completely different face. And, most egregiously, the "restorers" Sir Arthur Evans hired for the frescos in the Minoan palace of Knossos exercised so much of their own creativity around the surviving fragments that they transformed what we now know was a depiction of a monkey into a young boy.

The key goals nowadays are prevention, stability, reversibility, and honesty. Prevention means producing art on durable materials like acid-free paper, keeping fragile materials in climate-controlled rooms, bundling up outdoor sculptures in wintertime to protect them from the cold, and otherwise trying to forestall problems from getting a foothold in the first place. Stability means leveraging our improved knowledge of chemistry to ensure that the materials we use to repair or protect works of art are less likely to cause damage later on. Reversibility means doing our best to guarantee that anything we add can be removed later on without harm: it's fine to put protective varnish on a painting or a sculpture, so long as we can also wipe it away. And honesty means that, if we fill in the gaps on some fragmentary relic, we let the seams show, instead of trying to pass off our own additions as the genuine article.

Do we succeed at adhering to these goals all the time, in all circumstances? Of course not. And even when we try, we may miss the mark, such that later generations curse us for well-meaning interventions that accidentally made things worse. But we do the best we can with the knowledge and tools we have, which is all that anyone can promise.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/kvMTkk)

Forgery: where art and crime intersect.

Not all kinds of forgery are art, of course. When my fourteen-year-old self forged my father's signature on my practice records to assure my band director that yes, of course I practiced at home as much as I was supposed to, there was no art involved there. (Rather the opposite, in fact.) I suppose you could argue that mimicking someone's handwriting is calligraphic forgery, but that feels to me like it's stretching the point. Counterfeiting we've already talked about separately, in the first year of this Patreon; the manufacture of fake IDs or other legal documents, or of something like knockoff Gucci purses, are also not the focus of this essay.

No, here we're concerned with the creation of fake objects of art, whether works attributed to a specific artist, or anonymous artifacts of a particular place and time. And this is a topic I find fascinatingly squirrelly.

The techniques necessary to pull this off have gotten increasingly sophisticated over time. Back in the day -- or even now, if you're selling to a credulous enough fool -- anything that passed muster to a casual glance might suffice. Get yourself a fresh sheet of parchment, papyrus, or paper, write or draw on it, apply some physical and chemical stresses to make it look old, and you're good to go. Fire a pot or clay figure, or carve something out of stone, then batter it around for that authentic chipped look. Maybe even stamp out an ancient coin or two, if it's a piece rare enough to be worth substantially more than its metal content.

These days, it's not nearly that simple. We have carbon dating, spectroscopic analysis, and other high-tech methods of determining whether some detail is out of place. Which doesn't mean forgeries have gone away; it just means that talented forger needs to know a lot more than just what their proposed artifact should look like. There's a thriving market in blank fragments of ancient papyrus -- so the substrate will pass an age check even if what's written on it is new -- and who knows what texts have been scraped off bits of parchment, what paintings have been covered or rubbed away, so something more lucrative can be put in their place. The best forgers need to know the chemistry of inks and paints, how to make the right tools, the techniques used back then, so that only the closest analysis by the most skilled experts can spot the fake.

Nor is it only about the object itself. These days, we also pay a lot of attention to provenance: the history of an object's ownership, which can help to prove that it wasn't made last week. (A very similar term, provenience, is used in archaeology to refer to where the object was found: relevant to sifting out illegally looted objects from those excavated under legitimate conditions.) Of course, if you want to pass off a fake as the real thing, you also have to forge a provenance -- hence the massive upswing after World War II in items that had been the property of an "anonymous Swiss collector," a fig leaf to cover Nazi theft and forgeries alike.

That's when you're just trying to make a Twelfth Dynasty Egyptian ushabti or a bronze ornament from Sanxingdui: a plausible example of a type, but nothing more specific than that. When you're trying to pass something off as a previously-unidentified Picasso or Rodin, then you can't hide behind the expected variations between different nameless historical artisans; you have to mimic not just the materials but the ideas, composition, and execution of that specific person -- well enough that it seems like it could have genuinely been their work.

And at that point, you very nearly have a Zen koan on your hands: if someone forges a Rembrandt so well it can't be told from the real thing, is there a meaningful difference? Is the art itself what's worthwhile, or the fact that it was made by a specific person?

The answer to that really depends on context. If I'm a layperson who likes Caravaggio's style of painting, and somebody else comes along who paints just like Caravaggio (without claiming those are his works), I might be delighted to acquire things of the exact type I like for a fraction of the cost. Yay for pretty art! By contrast, if a forger lies to me and I pay Caravaggio prices for something that doesn't suffer from the scarcity of the artist being dead for centuries, I'm probably going to be pissed. And if I'm an art historian trying to learn more about Caravaggio, that forger has actively poisoned the well of scholarship by introducing false data.

Some of our "forgery" problems now actual stem from situations more like that first example. You can buy a million and one plastic replicas of Michaelangelo's David in Florence, and nobody thinks of those as forgeries . . . but rewind a few centuries or millennia, and those replicas had to be hand-crafted out of marble or bronze or whatever suited the sculpture being copied. That wasn't forgery; it was just how art got replicated, and the best copyists were deploying a useful, legitimate skill. The same was true of paintings. Now, however, the interests of both scholarship and the aura of owning a verified-as-legitimate original mean we have to sort that historical wheat from the chaff.

Or take the workshop context in which many Renaissance artists operated. Apprentices were expected to mimic their master's style, and if the result was good enough, the master was free to sell those works under his (or, more rarely, her) own name. Again, nowadays we strive to separate those out from the authentic works of the master -- but that reflects a modern attitude where the individual genius is the most important thing, above whether it reflects their style or was made under their auspices.

Some forgeries are extremely famous. Han Van Meegeren had to out himself as a forger when he was accused of collaboration for selling a Vermeer to the Nazi Hermann Göring; to prove that he hadn't hocked a piece of cultural patrimony, he painted another one while court-appointed witnesses stood and watched. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has spent quite a bit of money trying to prove the disputed authenticity of a kouros (a specific style of statue) they bought for seven million dollars, but the best they've been able to achieve is a label identifying it as "Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery." The Boston Museum of Fine Arts similarly clings to the hope that their probably-fake "Minoan snake goddess" statuette might be the real thing.

One thing these forgeries have in common: the demand for the genuine article is high enough to make fakes worth the effort of their creation. Minoan snake goddesses got manufactured because Sir Arthur Evans' excavations at Knossos attracted a ton of publicity, and he was not particularly discriminating in buying the "discoveries" people brought to him. Few criminals bothered forging Indigenous art until collectors turned their attention toward those parts of the world, thereby creating demand. This can in turn come full circle: van Meegeren's post-trial fame made his paintings rise high enough in value that his own son wound up forging more of them.

Nobody knows for sure how many fakes are on display in museums, galleries, and private collections. Some estimates run very high, due to the way today's plutocrats treat the acquisition of art as an investment strategy and display of status, while others say that improved methods of detection and the emphasis on authenticating an object before somebody forks over millions for it have greatly reduced the incidence. We'll never really know for sure, because of the loss of face inherent in admitting you paid too much for a forgery -- including the cratering in value for other works that might become suspect by association. But if you want to tell a story of trickery and sordid doings, the art world is rife with possibility!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/aYnVC2)