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Comment by greggsy | Hacker News Reader

An experienced conservationist would know exactly what to do, and scope the work accordingly. It would go on show for a short period to capitalise on the current interest and attract foot traffic to the gallery, before being treated.

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Conservator 'best practice ' changes pretty much every decade, with each generation of conservators dismayed at all the damage done by their predecessors...

Conservators: the dentists of the art world.

Sounds like software development

That is true, but![1] This is well understood by modern conservators, so they use reversible materials as much as possible. For example paints which can be any time cleaned up with a weak solvent specifically selected such that it doesn't attack the base painting at all. The any time is a very important property here. Normal paints "set" after a while. You might clean them off the canvas a day later easily, with some difficulty a year later, and 30 years later it becomes basically impossible. But conservation paints don't do this. They can be cleaned up a day after the work is done, or 200 years after.

The other important property is that these materials are often designed to show up visibly under UV light. That way they can perfectly blend in the base paint under normal gallery lights (if desired, this is not always desired) but they will always show up for someone who investigates the painting in the future.

1: All my knowledge about the topic comes from the aforementioned Baumgartner Restoration YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BaumgartnerRestoration

If you watch Baumgartner's channel (as you do) this is a topic he is probably most careful about. He knows his first duty is to do nothing which can not be undone. Conservation paints and isolation layers are critical.

True... But what when the conservators work itself becomes a historic artifact? In the 25th century, there may be no way to separate and keep both the 15th century artwork and the 21st century conservators work.

Only if nobody cleans the thing for four centuries, and also we lose all knowledge of how the conservation was done.

This sounds a lot like software developers, except replace decade with 6 months.

“The first order of business is to blame everything on the guy before me.”

An experienced conservator (such as Baumgartner) would know how little he knows and would proceed with extraordinary caution if faced with the prospect of restoring a Van Gogh.

I suspect, if given the job, he would only do it in incredibly small steps with deep collaboration with his peers.

I've watched how cautiously he approaches paintings which (while admittedly beautiful) don't have 1% of the historical significance of a Van Gogh.

They wouldn't know "exactly" what to do. Just like every discipline there's many different ways to skin a cat, pros/cons, aims.

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