When I was in high school I remember reading of Russian course on Soviet Mathematics, where the focus was on the victory of the proletariat and not on theorems. I thought the notion obscene. I still do. I hope somebody with a sense of the absurd is playing pranks. If not, I have to question the integrity of those running their chemistry department. A scientist needs some smarts, but without integrity that's worthless.
That second one is a serious matter. My wife, who is an artist, is fascinated by the chemistry of the stuff. Preservation -- and restoration with an eye towards future preservation -- is both a practical engineering problem and a philosophical problem. (For an example of the latter: let's say that an old master used a particular pigment that achieves a particular effect, but which decays over 200 years. A restoration could use the same pigment or a newer chemical that produces a visually-identical tone but that does not decay. Does it violate the artistic intent to make the substitution? If you do, is the artwork less authentic because it is no longer made with technology that was available in the artist's lifetime? Indeed, is it proper to restore such art at all?)
ReplyDeleteWhich is proof that they are capable of creating useful applied chemistry courses.
ReplyDeleteAs to restoration--I figure as a first guess, since the artwork is presumably going to be lost without intervention:
If the artist screwed up (daVinci's Last Supper being a good example), restorers should reproduce with better materials. If that's impossible (daVinci again), seal it off as best you can and reproduce the current degraded status somewhere else.
If the more ephemeral pigments give an effect different from the modern ones, go with the originals, and hope somebody in the future will do the same.
If the artist simply could not have known that the pigments would be altered with smoke and centuries, then punt--go with the original materials and let somebody down the years worry about it.
Getting the brush strokes and layering right would seem a bit more significant than getting the exact materials. Though--now that I think of it--things like layering might be very different with different materials. Hmm. Harder problem than it looks.
If I were such an artist, what would I want? I'd hate for the work to be lost, but I could always make another, and I'd rather a copy survive than nothing. Or I might say "You paid me for it; it's all yours. Want to pay me to make something else?" Different artistic temperaments...
"A scientist needs some smarts, but without integrity that's worthless."
ReplyDeleteLike how Alfred Kinsey had almost as much integrity as Jimmy Savile.
A lot of the courses like Afro chemistry and Soviet Math are more like "History of Science" stuff rather than learning any hard science. That has value, but not the same value. Apples and oranges can substitute for each other, even vegetables and meats can be traded off if they are similar. But you can't substitute crackers for crockery. They just aren't enough the same in function.
ReplyDelete@Korora - Yeah, chapter 12. Where did they get all that information about the sexual responses of children? Ugly, ugly in a couple of ways.