During the last lecture Kate Cuffari from The Philadelphia Museum of Art came to talk to us about art conservation. This concerns keeping art and materials around as long as possible but also honoring the artist's intentions concerning their work.

There are different kinds of conservation, such as treatment, which is when they must repair a damaged work, and restoration, which takes place when something is actually missing from the work. Often they use nondestructive analysis such as X-rays or taking very samples and looking at them under a microscope in order to repair a work according to its original condition.

Preventative conservation is also very important. It can involve monitoring humidity, heat, pest problems, and anything that can help them forestall any kind of damage to the work involving how the work is presented. There are several causes of decay in artwork: willful destruction, the intention of the artist to have the work decay or degrade in which the material's decay affects the meaning of the work, unintended degradation, and issues concerning how the work was stored or displayed.

Kate sited many interesting examples, including Man Ray's Object to be Destroyed, which some art appreciator took literally and shot the work with a pistol.

She also urged us to think about the kinds of materials and techniques we use, to do our research, and to consider whether we would like our work to last with its original condition intact or whether we would like the decay of our work to contribute to the meaning of it.

Overall, it was a very interesting lecture.