The VG Resource

So today there was a news article on how some restoration work is being carried out on some stained glass windows in a church in central London, and that it'll take 7 years with fine care to preserve the artwork that it portrays. They're taking out some old restoration techniques of using a black fibre and instead replacing it with a newly developed clear resin.

This comes months after the article about a woman who tried to restore that painting of Jesus from a church somewhere, who botched it up excessively bad. Like, beyond words bad.

What is your opinion on restoration of art?

My opinion is that the restoration of art is utterly wrong - but preservation is vital. I find that restoring, as in painting inbetween the lines where time has decayed a painting or any other art piece, alters what that painting now is, and what it was. I cannot paint the Mona Lisa millimetre to millimetre and say that it is the same painting - it just isn't. But if the Mona Lisa over 100 years started to chip away in gaps, and I then fill those in, it is still called to be the original painting.
And I disagree - I find it appauling that we accept that it is flogged to us as the original, when it's only a percentage of the original, and a percentage of some unnamed restoration worker.

However, with preservation, we can keep the remains of the original art for as long as possible, and I believe that THAT is important. We should be allowed to appreciate the art that we have remaining and not question what of it is original and what isn't.

I think restoration is acceptable if it can accurately restore the original - obviously it's not going to be perfect, nothing is. However, if it isn't botched (like a certain painting of Jesus) I think it's a good idea.

Preservation should always be a thing, even if it's in simple, non-direct ways like taking pictures/scans, especially digital (as copying those will never cause degradation unlike taking copies of analogue signals ).

art is meant to be destroyed

The real question is, what matters most:
-the tangible, physical object
-or the idea of this object?
Once the object is restored/renovated, is it still the original? Can an unknowing layer of restoration be considered the original, and what happens if the image we know isn't the "accurate" original? Isn't refurbishing the object in a way retrieving its idea?

Also, restoration techniques have evolved dramatically since the 19th century-the current experts restoring art actually have to start by getting rid of the layers of previous restorations because they didn't always follow the original methods used to create the piece, or had changed/added/removed elements from it.
With our present scientific knowledge, experts can get far closer to the original processes used to get a more or less exact impression of what the object initially looked like. Another issue is the significance of a restoration to the object's history, which could say a lot about where it came from, who made it, who possessed it at the time, etc...

This has been what I have heard from somebody who restores art, but unfortunately as Dazz has pointed it out, this isn't necessarily the goal of all restoration.

as long as skilled people do it i dont see why n

No physical object lasts forever unless you duplicate it. The idea of the work is actually more important the the work itself, since the influential impact of the art lasts forever.

Take a lot of historical musical pieces. It is not the original sheets of paper Mozart wrote on that is important, it is the song!

Art is subjective, it's human, it has no physical tangible value beyond what we give it and strangely that makes it one of the most valuable things that we have in society.

Art itself, the physical object, sound or text, means nothing at all, but what's important is that it serves as a sort of catalyst for how you react to it as a person, I'd almost go so far as to say that art is an important part of what makes you human.

The greatest and most important pieces of art, the ones that have the most impact or influence on people as a whole should obviously be preserved as long as possible, but even the best preservation techniques don't last forever.
Even airtight hermetic seals can't save something indefinitely, and converting to a digital format, which arguably changes the art and removes some of the fundamental aspects of it, is still only temporary, digital media breaks down just like everything else.

So the only real option is to restore things as well as we can, to allow future generations to see, hear or read the same art that meant so much to previous generations of people, at a base level restoring a much loved piece of art says something very important about it, it says that we as a society decided that it was worthy of saving, that a pointless item which serves no practical purpose meant enough to society to keep it for as long as we can.

Or in short, objects break and degrade over time, but the ideas they inspire can last forever.

(10-24-2012, 08:24 AM)PatientZero Wrote: [ -> ]Even airtight hermetic seals can't save something indefinitely, and converting to a digital format, which arguably changes the art and removes some of the fundamental aspects of it, is still only temporary, digital media breaks down just like everything else.

Your analogy breaks down when you realize you can simply CTRL+C from a failing HDD onto a new one, though

With paintings there are techniques to either remove "proper" restorations or use special X-Rays to be able to see the original.

York Minster (that's a big ass cathedral by the way) is currently being restored, as in every single piece of outside stone is being removed and replaced with an identical new piece, in essence it won't be the same building. But you can't stop stone from being weathered, and much of it's detailed splendour has long been lost. If it wasn't restored it would eventually become a ruin. And by restoration it can once again be the building it was meant to be.

I don't know if it's right, but I can't see of an alternative.

(10-24-2012, 02:31 PM)Goemar Wrote: [ -> ]York Minster (that's a big ass cathedral by the way) is currently being restored

Heh. I used to be able to see that from my bedroom window My grandad helped fund the restoration of the main window some years ago.

Having seen it fairly recently, it is very weathered in places, and in my opinion, it's better to replace the weathered stone with new pieces, to restore it to an approximation of how it used to look, than let it crumble into ruin.

I agree with structural rebuilding, because the building serves a physical purpose. A building can be art, but it's also used, so it should be restored.