Since we spent today at the British Museum, I can still keep musing about preservation and longevity. (I promise I'll stop soon.) The museum is simply amazing; the archetechture is dramatic, and it houses a number of well-known cultural items, including the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles. Many of the objects in the Museum are ancient, and most are originals, but for some few objects, the Museum holds exceedingly well executed copies or recreations (labeled as such). So what matters? The object itself, or the information the object contains?
Not to get too existential, but really, what is the "object" anyway? These painted fragments look odd and, frankly, gaudy to the modern eye. We're used to seeing these as pure white marble with clean, undecorated lines. But, when they were contemporary, many statutes would have been painted. So even when a full object has survived unbroken, on some level we're still not seeing an "original." We've learned to appreciate these works of art in a way that the artists' didn't intend. I'm not sure if it's good or bad, or neither, but it raises issues about how we maintain objects.
Sometimes damaged or imperfectly preserved objects can show us something new, like the brilliant blue that refracts from the broken edges of this glass bowl.
And sometimes, the fragments are just beautiful the way they are...
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