The Grab List: How Museums Decide What to Save in a Disaster
December 15, 2025 at 11:49PMIn 2008, a flood imperiled the University of Iowa Museum of Art’s collection, which had been insured for around $250 million. Thousands of pieces of art were ultimately moved before the water found its way into the building. But some pieces—a $140 million Jackson Pollock, for instance—took priority. Lou Stoppard details the processes by which museums great and small strive to protect their collections from our ongoing climate crisis. (A renovated Whitney Museum, an architect tells her, is “designed like a submarine.”) Stoppard’s fascinating report makes room for challenging ideas about our relationship with art in perilous times.
Art is mutable. Greek sculptures were not white, as we think of them today; originally they were covered in lurid paint. Figures and details have been added into works at the whims of political regimes; conservation measures have been done and undone. Vandalism and decay are also part of the language of contemporary art, with artists using materials that evolve and degrade over time. Some even destroy their own work.
Their efforts can seem provocative, if one clings to the belief that art’s purity is synonymous with an unchanging nature. Yet today, a lively group of thinkers argues for art’s destruction as a preservation strategy. Fernando DomÃnguez Rubio, in his book “Still Life,” argues that artworks should not be seen as fixed, but as a “slow event that is still taking place as it evolves through organic and inorganic processes.” He writes that we should consider even the most beloved and historical masterpieces as “slowly unfolding disasters.”
Similarly, Jane Henderson, who teaches at Cardiff University and serves as secretary-general of the International Institute for Conservation, has argued against the removal of signs of distress or neglect from objects, referring to it as a form of “cleaning up history.” To a future museum visitor, a damaged painting may say more than one that has been shielded from the passage of time. Researchers at the City University of New York conducted a survey in which they asked participants to imagine that the Mona Lisa had been destroyed in a fire. Would they rather see the ashes or a faithful copy? Eighty per cent of respondents said the ashes.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/15/art-museum-climate-disaster/
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