The restoration process used by many museums is an effort to bring works of art back to the state they left the studio in. Now, many museums are facing a predicament when it comes to restoring some of their “newer works.” Today, many artists use technology and specifically the internet as platforms for their art. The issue arises when the technology used becomes obsolete and no longer functions the way the artist intended. For example, the Whitney Museum of American Art was one of the first to acquire an Internet-based work back in 1995 and when the museum decided to put the piece on display again, the art simply did not work. This piece created by Douglas Davis entitled “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence,” allowed users to add lines of text to his work. From 1994 through 2000, the work attracted over 200,000 contributions from around the globe, but today the coding that was used is obsolete and shows up as incomprehensible strings of text. So what do we do? Should the coding be updated to save the work? Or does updating the coding fundamentally change the original work created?
The Whitney decided to play it safe… They duplicated the original work, which is unusual in the art world, so they could keep the original untouched and would be able to display an updated format that would have meaning to the viewer and allow users to continue to make contributions.
Whitney Saves Douglas Davis’s ‘First Collaborative Sentence’ – NYTimes.com.