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Malignant Patina: A Love Story

What if art conservators wrote stories rather than just condition and treatment reports about the work we do? To physically conserve an object is also to converse with it, to ask after its health, to be with it in a way that alleviates its loneliness a little. Conservators encounter objects in their most vulnerable state, and we work to prolong the life story of the things that come to us even as we see how much they have lost of themselves over time. Such practices of care are emotional work, requiring a more empathetic and imaginative language of documentation. Conserving things of the past and writing a fuller accounting of the ways that we change things and the ways things change us is more truthful; in fact, it is a love story.