artsinsociety.com

By Randy Kennedy from The New York Times…

After a museumgoer’s trip and fall opened a rip in a century-old Picasso painting last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, officials there assured the public that — nightmarish as accidents are at a place entrusted with protecting priceless art — conservators would be able to fix the work quickly, in time for a major Picasso show in April.

But two other rare mishaps at the Met in recent years have provided hard lessons about the difficulty of making broken masterpieces whole again and of predicting when they will go back on view.

In 2002 a 15th-century marble statue by the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo — one of the most important High Renaissance statues in the museum’s collection — crashed to the floor and broke into hundreds of pieces when part of its dense plywood base buckled. Nearly six years later an Andrea della Robbia terra-cotta relief from the same period shattered after falling from a shelf above a doorway. Neither piece is back on view. More…

From Three-Toed Sloth…

This thread over at Unfogged reminds me of something that’s puzzled me for years, ever since reading this: why didn’t prints displace paintings the same way that printed books displaced manuscript codices? Why didn’t it become the expected thing that visual artists, like writers, would primarily produce works for reproduction? (No doubt, in that branch of the wave-function*, obsessive fans still want to get the original drawings, but obsessive fans also collect writer’s manuscripts, or even their typewriters, as well as their mass-produced books.) 16th century engraving technology was strong enough that it could implement powerful works of art (vide), so that can’t be it. And by the 18th century at least writers could make a living (however precarious) from writing for the mass public, so why were visual artists (for the most part) weren’t artists? (Again, it’s manifestly not as though technology has regressed.) Why is it still the case that a real, high-class visual artist is someone who makes one-offs? I know that reproductions have been important since at least the late 1800s, but for works and artists who first made their reputation with unique, hand-made objects, which is as though the only books which got sent to the printing press were ones which had first circulated to acclaim in manuscript. More…