The End of Conservation?

Abstract

[EN] Conservation has experienced more or less subtle changes during its circa 200-year history. However, some patterns may be discerned in the cloud of beliefs, ideas, terms, concepts and practices that today make up the field of cultural heritage conservation that suggest that the next change could have an unprecedented depth. The increasing perception of conservation as the consequence of an obsession; the passive acceptance of processes of deterioration and aging; the criticism that conservation alters the thing conserved and prevents cultural development; the assumption that conservation could be useless or even detrimental to future generations; the unbridled expansion of the concept of cultural heritage to include a huge variety of cultural expressions, both physical and metaphysical; the 'imminent loss' of skills and knowledge that had characterised the conservator's profession: if seen in combination, these symptoms suggest that a radical change could be taking place in the field of cultural heritage conservation, a change so extraordinary that it might lead to the end of conservation as we have known it.