Art Restoration Goes High Tech

from the don't-mess-with-art-restorers dept

The Economist has a long article looking at all the various technologies now used in art restoration. It seems like quite the high tech business, these days. Though, there are some debates about what should and shouldn't be done to artwork. There's even one guy who wants to simply make exact replicas of certain pieces of art, and hide away the originals while only displaying the copies. There's also a good story for those of you who have opinions about those modern art canvases that are all one color. There was a painting called (amazingly enough) "Black Painting" that was damaged. In the attempted restoration process, they realized that someone had already tried to paint over Black Painting with (get this) black paint! So, now they're trying to remove the false layer of black paint while repairing the other damage to the painting.
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  • identicon
    dorpus, 7 Nov 2002 @ 1:00pm

    long term effects

    In the 20th century, people bemoaned how we are becoming engulfed by sterile modern settings, because there was no longer an infrastructure for creating things the old-fashioned, labor-intensive way (rounded ceilings, brick roads, stone masonry, hand-woven fabrics, etc.).

    This and future nano-technologies should bring down the cost of making exact replicas of older artifacts. The new debate of the future will be on whether to keep 20th century artifacts like radio towers, telephone poles, concrete sea walls, etc. as "cultural assets".



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