I’ve gathered a few exhibits below to initiate a discussion: what are we really trying to preserve when we restore or protect a work of art or a cultural monument? Its material? Its original vision? Its impact? Or just the idea of it?
Exhibit A
Felix Gonzalez-Torres was a Cuban-born conceptual artist. His Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) consists of 175lbs of wrapped candies piled on the floor. Visitors are invited to take one; each evening, museum staff replenish the loss. The work represents the gradual decline of the artist’s partner Ross, who died of AIDS.
Versions of this piece exist in several major museums. None retain the original candies. So: which version was an original artwork? Is it still? Are all the versions original artworks?
The Art Institute of Chicago ‘loaned’ their version to a museum in Japan. The Japanese museum was instructed buy 175lbs of locally available wrapped candies. While the Japanese installation was on view, the Art Institute removed its version from display, implying that there is something intangible that can’t exist in two places at once. What is that?
Gonzales-Torres didn’t position any of the candies now on display. If I bought 175lbs of wrapped candies and tipped them out on my floor, do I have a museum-quality piece of contemporary art? If not, why not? Could a thief steal The Art Institute’s version?
Exhibit B
After catastrophic fires at York Minster (1984), Windsor Castle (1992), the Glasgow School of Art (2014/18), and Notre-Dame in Paris (2019), restoration teams chose to rebuild these landmarks as they were before the flames — even when some elements, like Notre-Dame’s spire, were relatively modern additions and there were loud calls to replace it with something suited to the “techniques and challenges of our era.” Conservative voices prevailed.
Exhibit C
The Royal Academy in London owns a copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper. It was painted, possibly in Leonardo’s lifetime by one of his students. It’s in far better condition than the original in Milan — which has been overpainted, eroded, and “restored” many times, often destructively.
The Milan mural has almost none of Leonardo’s original brushwork left. Yet it remains the object of pilgrimage and devotion — while the RA version is largely unknown.
If we wished to grasp the brilliance of Athenian sculptors and architects, should we take them to Athens, Greece or to Nashville, Tennessee, where they can see a historically accurate, full-scale replica of the original Temple of Athena, complete with decorative sculptures?
Our greatest museums proudly display beautiful marble statues from Ancient Rome. But many are mere copies of now-lost Greek bronze sculptures.
Exhibit D
Time, wind and entropy mean that, without intervention, the pyramids of Egypt will gradually vanish.
Meanwhile, visitors to the pyramids are invited to imagine (with varying degrees of success) their former grandeur.
The Proposal
So what are we trying to preserve? Where does the essence of an artwork reside?
If originality is all, we should allow everything to decay. If we care about the artist’s vision, maybe a high-resolution digital copy of the RA version should replace the faded and crumbling mural in Milan.
But if the goal is to truly communicate the incredible talents of our ancestors, perhaps modern reproductions of the Parthenon marbles should be reassembled where they belong – on the Parthenon. And imagine the pyramids at Giza, refaced and recapped in gold to show what once was.
The pyramids are a particularly vivid opportunity – there are, after all, three of them. Restore one fully, restore one as a work-in-progress demonstrating how it was built and leave one for the purists to observe as chip-by-chip it is reclaimed by the desert.
And bear in mind that, done carefully, the modern additions can be removed at any time if so desired. I’m betting few will vote for that deconstruction.
Oh, and let’s fix up the Sphinx while we’ve got the scaffolding on site.
Visionary? Vandalism? Vanity?
What do you think?