Art and design | The Guardian: Early one morning last summer, I stood inside a museum in Antwerp and watched as a painting was hung on the wall. When I walked in, the gallery was empty. To one side, there was a crate about a metre square. Royal blue, it was unmarked apart from a code number and a yellow stencilled sign reading “Lato da Aprire / Open this Side”.
8 comments:
This was a really fascinating article and demonstrates the difference in levels that different industries are working on, I mean if we’re designing shows for the warehouse we’re just happy if we remembered to make it fit on the truck. This reminded me of one of the reality TV shows that I used to watch called shipping wars and a lot of the times if they were shipping large sculptures or something they would get there to pick up the piece and then tell the artist that it needed to be cut in half and then chaos would ensue, obviously this work of transportation is such a different level. There are so many nuances (though it was funny to hear them say some people still forgot to make it fit through the door) like someone needing to sleep in a truck or the artwork needing it’s own first class seat, or even the set up for the guards to follow the artwork, it’s so elaborate and cool but I certainly wouldn’t want to be in charge of it. I don’t want to work in an industry where I can’t tell someone to let something fall if it’s endangering them and then have a fight about it, its so high risk and honestly I think dealing with the people would be a pain. Nonetheless it is still really cool to see what an expensive lesser known industry has been formed.
I would never want to be in the business of shipping artworks that cost more than my own life is worth. Someone has to do the job, but it needs to be someone with a far more careful lifestyle than me. When I'm moving things from one room to another and I drop something and it chips a little bit I can always say oh it's not that important, or I can get another one. Priceless artworks are not just things that you can fix, or let sit, or just replace. You don't want to be the guy that scratched a Monet, or chipped the frame of a Picasso. That's something you just never could get over. It's no surprise that this is a costly affair. If you have expensive merchandise you are going to want the expensive insurance plan as well. This article not only outlined the importance of jobs that involve the movement and care of artworks, but also what a stressful job being a curator can be. You need to make sure that that artwork gets from here to there in one piece, and as that art is usually not going to be going missing anytime soon, this can take a while. Accidents happen, but if you're handling a precious artwork you better hope it doesn't happen on your watch.
Museum work is something I am really interested in. This article really confirmed how much slower their timeline is than that of theatre. This business also seems quite terrifying. The timeline is so slow to ensure that nothing falls through the crack, but the amount of things that could go wrong is incredible, not to mention the price of what is being handled is more than I can even fathom. Seeing governments and the most major art organizations in the world be involved in every detail is incredible. These artworks not only need to make it where they are going, but they need to ensure that the piece is put back together properly, not chipped/scratched, there is no water damage, etc. This is so different from theatre where we toss things around, put people’s safety over the object, and, for the most part, exist by the 40 foot rule. Then again, the similarities are quite striking (can it make it through the door?).
Thinking about museum works is a whole other concept to wrap your head around given the nature of other touring or traveling things we might get out hands on. If an element from a show arrives in a truck broken, either shipped from a shop or from another theater or previous destination, it is a setback. However, more often than not the worst thing is a loss of time and money to make the repair and make it fast. It does not matter who made it or who fixed it that is not what gives the piece its value. In the art and museum world, that is a large part of the value of the piece. If, in shipping, a work was damaged, it is not only a setback in time and money, but it has a much higher chance of being an extreme tragedy or incredibly sticky situation for the artifact loaner. The masters are not here to fix their works. There are people trained to preserve and restore, but they can only do so much should damage prove catastrophic. It is incredible to me how rarely this happens given the fragile nature of the shipped work and their severe vulnerability.
This job sounds terrifying, but also very fulfilling and unique. I can’t imagine being not just so close to so many world famous artworks, but actually responsible for them in their most vulnerable times. I can’t help but think of all the art heist movies, and how they always try to steal whatever they are stealing while it’s in transit. It makes sense, and considering the ridiculous value of these pieces, I would imagine it is not unheard of for somebody to try it. Even with security to make the likelihood of someone successfully stealing a masterpiece pretty low, as a courier or someone in charge of making sure the art gets to where it needs to go, I would be terrified that the piece might get damaged when someone tried to take it. Overall, it seems like a really interesting job, and I would love to hear more about it from someone that’s actually worked in the business.
I’m a pretty careful person, but I still wouldn’t trust myself to take on the task of moving priceless pieces of artwork. I’d be way too paranoid about it the whole time and that would cause me to mess up. Even just for some little things I make, I’m scared to move them from where they are, let alone a multi-billion dollar artwork. I can’t imagine the feeling of horror if you found that something that’s hundreds of years old got ruined because you were moving it. Props to the people who actually have the job of transporting them. This article was pretty interesting to read and it gave insights to the insane amounts of money these pieces are loaned at, as well as how they manage to cart them thousands of miles unharmed. I’m not surprised that all of the crazy procedures, equipment, and security needed to just carry out the task of shipping comes at quite the cost.
This incredible article answered so many of the questions I’ve had for a long time about the art world. As an avid art-viewer (and near art history major), I always keep up to date on major exhibitions happening around me so I never miss a rare opportunity to see work making a brief trip from across the globe. I’ve often seen the same piece in multiple institutions, doing a double-take when I realize that the sculpture before me in the Carnegie Museum of Art was my old friend from the Guggenheim Museum two years prior. A few movies have endeavored to portray the secretive and incredibly delicate process of fine art shipping, and I always turned my nose up at the dramatized and overly-suspenseful depictions. But as I was reading this article, those images were the only ones that came to mind-- intensely quiet, with everything on the line glaringly reminding the crew of the significance of the work with every step. Beyond all the logistical delicacies, I’ve also developed a newfound appreciation for the curator’s layout of the works in the space. Not only do these fragile and unimaginably valuable pieces from all over the world have to arrive at the same place, but they must be arranged in the galleries in a sensible narrative or a logical collection. I love learning about the secretive art world just as much as I love having the privilege of highly accessible public art, and I think we should all be more educated art-experiencers before the industry begins to depend too much on Instagram snapshots.
Until now, I’d never really thought about how much human work is involved in moving such delicate and expensive pieces of art from museum to museum. Obviously you want the safest way possible, which at the current state of technology means a human. I could never do this- I get terrified driving home from the store and hearing my groceries slide in the trunk. The precision of the process being described and the thought of being held responsible for damage occurring to such an expensive and irreplaceable artifact are both terrifying. Eventually I imagine this to be a job where humans are replaced by robots- not yet, but once they become advanced enough to be trustworthy enough to not damage these expensive artifacts. I’m impressed with the professionalism and level of training of the people doing this work, but I could never do it myself- not even because I’m clumsy, but because the pressure would cause me to make mistakes.
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