[Reader-list] Nothing lasts for ever

[sanjay ghosh]

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An extract from a thoughtful article regarding the consequences of the warehouse fire which detroyed a large part of what constituted 'Britart'. 

- sanjay ghosh

Guardian Unlimited / Mark Lawson / Saturday May 29, 2004

In the week of the Britart blaze in east London, this strange image raises the larger question of the shelf life of culture. But the mere fact that a company such as Momart can make a huge business from artwork warehouses around London demonstrates the existence of a taboo about the destruction of art.  

We can understand why the idea of immortality adhered to the visual arts. It is the only cultural form in which we are routinely experiencing the original, rather than the distant copies through which we experience books, movies, television and classic theatre and dance. When a book is destroyed for reasons of either commerce or censorship, the text generally survives: first in a central library, now electronically. 

Reading interviews with artists lamenting that they had lost a decade's work or more also made me think of a parallel devastation in television, when many writers and producers saw 10 years' output vanish not as a result of a freak fire but of management policy. In the 1960s, the bulk and cost of storing programmes on videotape led to a cull of programmes that has left the history of the period seriously incomplete. While some have retrospectively cast this decision as philistinism, it was mainly motivated by space. Digital technology now has given TV a deeper memory, although recent reports that the first music CDs are becoming unreadable 20 years on reminds us that all archival systems have limitations. 

Beyond the human pain and artistic debate caused by the Momart blaze, it is finally a story of storage. A cultural assumption that art should last for ever led to a big business that managed this ambition. The failure of the system in no way deserves the glee in some areas about the loss of modern art - but it does encourage us to consider whether we have become in general too reverential about the total preservation of one art form. 

For complete article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1227329,00.html