by Stefan Michalski
There is no doubt that the preservation of contemporary art collections involves novel and complex problems unfamiliar to the staff of a traditional fine art museum. Yet none of these problems is novel to the museum world as a whole. Furthermore, the concepts and techniques developed by other types of museum that have long dealt with preservation offer useful tools to museums of contemporary art. For preservation surveys in all types of museums, a database application is currently being developed at the Canadian Conservation Institute. It accommodates all those problems that appear novel to the preservation of contemporary art collections.
This article was originally published in: Hummelen, IJ., Sillé, D., Modern Art: Who Cares?, Amsterdam: Foundation for the Conservation of Modern Art/ Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, 1999, p. 290-295.