Cambridge gallery lends art to students 'with none damaged' in 60 years

Re:Cambridge gallery lends art to students 'with none damage... by davinic on Thursday October 17, 2019 @04:32PM (#21286101)

When it comes to long-term storage of art, damage can be calculated in more ways than whether a piece of art is noticeably defaced.

The biggest threat to these pieces lies in being stored outside of a climate, light, and humidity-controlled environment. When the lifespan of a thing is hundreds or thousands of years, this matters just as much.

However, if the museum doesn't normally keep its stored pieces in a controlled environment, then this should be no different.

But kudos to these organizations for trusting the students enough to do this.

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Re:Cambridge gallery lends art to students 'with none damage... by opwieurposiu on Thursday October 17, 2019 @05:59PM (#21286733)

Storage has other problems; A painting stored away in a climate controlled vault where no one can look at it is just a dusty canvas rectangle.

A painting requires a viewer for it to become art.

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Re:Cambridge gallery lends art to students 'with none damage... by cgriswald on Thursday October 17, 2019 @08:47PM (#21287698)

A copy of the painting can serve for viewing nearly as well as the original. But a copy can’t answer some questions so preserving the original for future study (and new questions, ideas, and technology) is valuable.

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Re:Cambridge gallery lends art to students 'with none damage... by simonh on Thursday October 17, 2019 @09:15PM (#21287826)

The point is though that future study doesn’t necessarily have a higher value than current study. Especially if the art is likely to degrade over time in some respects anyway.

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Re:Cambridge gallery lends art to students 'with none damage... by skeptical900067 on Thursday October 17, 2019 @10:47PM (#21288234)

>A copy of the painting can serve for viewing nearly as well as the original.

Maybe for a lay-viewer. As an amateur realist painter, even the very best prints seem to lose 75-80% of the mark-making and process clues that are easily observable in originals.

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Re:Cambridge gallery lends art to students 'with none damage... by jacquesm on Thursday October 17, 2019 @06:15PM (#21286841)

> A painting stored away in a climate controlled vault where no one can look at it is just a dusty canvas rectangle.

It may just as well not exist at all.

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Re:Cambridge gallery lends art to students 'with none damage... by jandrese on Thursday October 17, 2019 @04:38PM (#21286148)

Presumably the kids get an education on where to place the works. Not next to a window where it's going to eat full sun in the afternoon for example. I also assume that it's the kind of thing that is mostly only known to the kind of kids that are going to take good care of the works.

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