Stefan Michalski, “Relative Humidity: A Discussion of Correct/Incorrect Values (1993),” in Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation, ed. Sarah Staniforth (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2013), 167.
Imagine a house museum whose collection of furniture and paintings has, a few exceptions aside, remained stable and in relatively good condition for a hundred years. By using historical weather records and studying how the house responds to climatic extremes, one can determine the upper and lower extremes of temperature and RH the collection has survived. Say that this collection has fared well at temperatures ranging from 40°-100°F and RH ranging from 30-70%; the collection’s proofed fluctuation, then, is 70±30°F and 50±20% RH. Note that while the mid-point of this range is very close to 20/50 (68°F and 50% RH), empirical data shows that conditions have swung broadly around that point with few ill effects. Stefan Michalski, “Agents of Deterioration: Relative Humidity,” Canadian Conservation Institute (2017), ➝.
In the example in the previous footnote, that would mean maintaining a climate of 70±15°F and 50±10% RH. Michalski, “Relative Humidity,” 167.
Michalski, “Agents of Deterioration: Relative Humidity”; Stefan Michalski, “Agents of Deterioration: Incorrect Temperature,” Canadian Conservation Institute (2017), ➝.
“Understanding Fluctuations and Equilibrations,” Image Permanence Institute (May 14, 2020), 17-18, 38. See also Charles Tumosa et al., “A Discussion of Research on the Effects of Temperature and Relative Humidity on Museum Objects,” Western Association for Art Conservation Newsletter 18, no. 3 (1996).
This number comes from a mathematical simulation drawing on European data; the study presumes a 1200 square meter (12,000 square foot) museum located in Rome. The authors calculated a 40% energy savings by moving from 50±2% RH to 50±10% RH, meaning that moving back to a tolerance of ±2% would entail an energy increase of 66.6%. Fabrizio Ascione, Laura Bellia, Alfonso Capozzoli, and Francesco Minichiello, “Energy saving strategies in air-conditioning for museums,” Applied Thermal Engineering 29, no. 4 (2009): 676-686.
IPI recommends these fluctuations stay within the “moderate range” of 30-60% RH. “Understanding Fluctuations,” 35. Keeping this narrow range is important for highly sensitive archival collections of acidic paper, celluloid film, and magnetic tape, though this is mostly because these materials prefer as dry a climate as possible.
David Erhardt, Charles S. Tumosa, and Marion F. Mecklenberg, “Applying Science to the Question of Museum Climate (2007),” in Staniforth, ed., Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation,175-176.
Michalski, “Agents of Deterioration: Incorrect Relative Humidity.”
Michalski, “Agents of Deterioration: Incorrect Temperature.”
Michalski, “Agents of Deterioration: Incorrect Temperature.”
In London, for example, the average summer daytime high of 73°F is fully within an acceptable range for paintings and many other object types, while winter lows of 40°F are far from harmful and may even benefit some objects—though visitor comfort would demand such lows were restricted to storage, and the wet British climate would still require some form of dehumidification for certain collections.
“Understanding Fluctuations,” 10; “National Archives extends life expectancy of its textual Records at its College Park facility AND saves energy at the same time,” Press Release, National Archives and Records Administration (May 23, 2013), ➝.
O.P. Agrawal, “‘Appropriate’ Indian Technology for the Conservation of Museum Collections (1981),” in Staniforth, ed., Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation, 48-49. Agrawal’s essay was originally written for a UNESCO project documenting non-Western and non-Global North technologies for collection care.
Teiji Itoh, “Kura: Design and Tradition of the Japanese Storehouse (1973),” in Staniforth, ed., Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation, 37-41.
Kazuko Hioki, “From Japanese Tradition: Is Kura a Model for a Sustainable Preservation Environment?” in From Gray Areas to Green Areas: Developing Sustainable Practices in Preservation Environments: Symposium Proceedings (Austin, TX: The Kilgarlin Center for Preservation of the Cultural Record, 2007).
Sarah Staniforth, “Preface,” in Staniforth, ed., Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation, xii.
Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020),166.
Domínguez Rubio, Still Life, 167.
Stephen Hackney, “The Evolution of a Conservation Framing Policy at the Tate,” in Museum Microclimates: Contributions to the Copenhagen Conference (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 2007, 229-236.
Jerry Shiner, “Trends in Microclimate Control of Museum Display Cases,” in Museum Microclimates, 268-269.
See Francis Toledo, et al., “The use of glass boxes to protect modern paintings in warm humid environments,” in Museum Microclimates, 237-261.
Hackney, “The Evolution of a Conservation Framing Policy at the Tate,” 229.
Grasskamp, 83.
Paul Philippot and H. J. Plenderleith, “Climatology and Conservation in Museums,” Museum 8, no. 4 (1960): 275-276.
“Understanding Fluctuations,” 46-47.
Equilibration is the state in which an object will, absent further changes in its environment, no longer engage in exchanges of moisture or thermal energy with its surroundings. “Understanding Fluctuations,” 6.
Domínguez Rubio, 221. Walter Grasskamp, “The White Wall—On the Prehistory of the ‘White Cube’,” On Curating, issue 9 (2011).
Walter Grasskamp, “The White Wall—On the Prehistory of the ‘White Cube’,” On Curating, issue 9 (2011).
Margriet Schavemaker, “The White Cube as a Lieu de Mémoire,” Reinwardt Memorial Lecture, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, March 2016, ➝.
Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1976), 15.
O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 19.
O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 16.
Confusion, of course, is never completely avoidable. The white cube’s capacity to elevate everything within it to the status of art is itself the cause of occasional confusion. Once, when I was a teenager and still exhilarated by the idea that art could be anything, I noticed a small, jewel-like metal and glass box sitting directly on the floor of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The delicate machinery inside struck me as beautiful, and so I asked the nearby security guard who had made it and—testing my knowledge—whether it was a Duchamp. The guard doubled over in laughter. The object, it turned out, was a hygrothermograph. Just over a decade later I would find myself again puzzling over this device, then as a collections worker who wondered how all those curves and spikes had come to be, and what they meant for the objects in my care.
Grasskamp, 85-87.
J. P. Brown and William B. Rose, “Humidity and Moisture in Historic Buildings: The Origins of Building and Object Conservation,” APT Bulletin 27, no. 3 (1996): 15.
Traditionalists balked, arguing that the paintings were so shockingly pale and bright. They might have said the paintings appeared too contemporary, too unmediated, too close, but this was just what many of art’s most faithful champions wanted.
See Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
The most fragile objects, it turns out, are the most ubiquitous: magnetic tape, celluloid film, and acidic paper such as newsprint were all created with an eye to mass distribution rather than preservation. Lower temperature and RH can extend their lives profoundly, but they live on borrowed time. Small changes in these objects trigger profound and information-erasing effects because of the fact that their actual informational value is encoded in miniature form on their surface. The secret to their conservation is relatively simple, however; it involves being as cold and dry as possible.
Hioki, “From Japanese Tradition.”
Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, “After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance!” Technology and Culture 59, no. 1 (January 2018): 1-25.
Charles Escne and Steven ten Thije, eds., Towards an Infrastructure of Humans: Working Group Statements, Humans of the Institution, 25-27 November 2017 (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2017), 8-9.
See StrikeMoMA.
W.A.G.E., “Dear Dad,” March 5, 2010, ➝.
See Anni Irish, “Changing Institutional Culture from the Inside Out: Why More and More US Museum Workers are Forming Unions,” The Art Newspaper, May 18, 2023, ➝.
“We don’t have the money,” complained former US Senator and climate envoy John Kerry in May 2024. Without a dramatic change in funding structures, he argued, the energy transition will fail. The International Energy Agency suggests that 70% of the money needed to fund renewables will have to come from the private sector. It leaves open the question of how to compel profit-oriented institutions to make these investments. Attraca Mooney, “The $9tn question: how to pay for the green transition,” Financial Times, May 5, 2024.