In cultural heritage conservation and paintings conservation especially, most of the materials used to treat artworks are petroleum derived plastics and solvents. Toxic for wildlife, toxic for humans, but used to care for and prolong the life of art. In fact, without these products, conservation treatments as we know them today would be extremely different, if not impossible.

It feels ironic to prolong the life of the inanimate to the detriment of the living, perhaps indicating that our value system has become somewhat misplaced.

It would be a shame however, to completely forego conservation treatments altogether, but I am a firm believer in balance. So how can we begin to care for natural heritage and cultural heritage equally, and where is the line that separates them to begin with? Is the natural environment not also inherently cultural (watch this space for a post dedicated to this topic)?

To create this balance, we may consider that the starting point could be measuring the carbon value of an artwork, and it’s subsequent conservation treatment(s). After this measurement, one would weigh the carbon value against the artwork, but who would be responsible for making this measurement, and how?

In an ideal scenario to create inherent balance within the conservation process, perhaps a carbon cap is attributed to every artwork based upon size, material, etc. Once conservation treatments hit this carbon emission value, treatment must cease or be limited for an allotted amount of time, resetting maybe every ten years (this is a very loose ideation). The conservator and client can decide which treatments are of the utmost importance to address, and the conservator can decide which materials might reduce the carbon value by consulting the Life Cycle Analysis of their range of materials. Addressing the life cycle analysis of materials allows the conservator to choose materials that have a lower carbon cost.

As an extreme example from my experience in private conservation practices, I have encountered artworks that have extremely detrimental inherent vice that must be treated continuously over decades, as frequently as once per year. To any non-conservators reading: inherent vice indicates an object or artwork that has internally characteristic weaknesses or defects, or has a quality attributed to a material that is inevitably self-deleterious. An unfortunate amount of fun, new, 20th-century materials fall into this category.

Take oil paintings for example; though not a new material (but certainly fun), oil paintings can also have inherent vice as a result of application. The common adage for oil painting states that an artist should paint “fat over lean” which means using less oil on the bottom layers, and increasing the oil ratio as the layers are built up. There is a reason for this- oil dries very slowly, and if a thicker paint sits on top of a layer thinned with oil, the oil cannot dry adequately and remains flexible. The top layers are likely to shift, separate/crack as a result.

I digress.

Paintings or other artworks that have inherent vice that require many treatments over time incur a massive carbon cost as a result. At what point can it be determined to be too far, and the cost of cultural heritage against natural heritage is too much? Who is ultimately the one to decide if an artwork should simply be left to deteriorate, and how can conservators be involved in this process? Maybe the answer is simply monitoring the deterioration rather than intervening (as painful as this is to consider).

It isn’t necessarily the fault of the artist that their work may not last because of their chosen materials, but for how long is it appropriate to prolong the ‘life’ of artwork at the cost of the natural environment?

There is ample room to include many people in this conversation, and if you have comments, arguments, or additional thoughts I would love to hear them.

Thanks for reading!

For more information on inherent vice see the AIC Wiki page.

For more information on Life Cycle Analysis see this blog post by Sarah Nunberg and Sarah Sutton.