Museums often display objects suspended in light, as if magically captured and protected forever from the ravages of time and the world: it's a lie.
Nothing is permanent in a museum. The implicit promise, that what it holds will be preserved and passed on to future generations, is at best a pious aspiration, at worst a covenant which is being betrayed, said the House of Lords Science and Technology committee yesterday.
Their report, published yesterday (PDF), put it brutally: without major investment in conservation science, large swaths of our cultural heritage may be lost - and with it yet another area of expertise in which Britain once led the world. Money, and lots of it, which can only come from central sources, is needed, and determination to rebuild and foster the skills of conservators may be needed even more.
Deaccessioning - giving away or flogging off objects which are too big, too dull, too common, and too expensive either to display or store - is a hot topic in the museum world at the moment. But deaccessioning by neglect, allowing an object to rot in a damp store, is far more common and far less discussed.
Rust never sleeps, and neither do book- or woodworms, death watch or carpet beetles. Heat will bend a medieval ivory like a bow. Light can bleach a Madonna's blue cloak into a dusty brown. Algae and pollution will seep into the heart of a stained glass window and eat out the eyes of a saint, leaving the glass itself like a slab of wet sugar. Even the fatty, damp smear of a human finger print, or the gush of warm, moist bacteria-laden air from a sigh of admiration, can trigger decay in some scrap of history which has survived a thousand lifetimes.
Conservation scientists, whose skill often seems closer to alchemy to mere mortals, can stop the rot even if they cannot reverse it - but there are few of them, and they feel more endangered than the collections they care for.
They take years to train, and once trained need space, time, and expensive materials. In-house conservation work is almost dead: increasingly, all over the country, their work is being contracted out. It undoubtedly costs the museums and galleries more per job, but then think what they save in sick leave, holidays, pensions - and don't bother to count what they lose in a body of knowledge about their collections from the inside-out, and in skills which can be fostered and passed on.
One of the joys of being a judge on the Conservation Awards, I've found, is the chance to travel the country, seeing what conservators can achieve given half a chance: a medieval doom painting recovered from a wall which was as black as soot, a Bronze Age burial urn rebuilt from a handful of broken crockery.
The most astounding project I have seen was the reconstruction of a crazy little red plane, held together with piano wire and faith, for the new museum in Swansea. The Robin Goch is claimed as the first in the world with night -lying equipment, including a height gauge consisting of a plumb bob thrown over the side on a length of fishing line.
It was rebuilt by Teresa Williams, an American postgrad student on a work placement: it turned out that she could think herself into the mind of the mad genius who built the plane, because in a previous life she had been a US air force maintenance engineer. The work she did was so exceptional, her passion for the job so touching and inspiring, that I thought museums would fight to get her as soon as she graduated. She wasn't offered a single job, her visa ran out, and she has gone back to the States. Her loss, and ours.
