I know that when I was asked to participate in this symposium it was most likely expected that I would lament today’s obsession with obsolescence and the triumph of the ephemeral, and that I would proclaim the lasting qualities of art while decrying its diminishment in the culture at large and, in too many cases, the museum world as well.

I would, of course, be perfectly ready and willing to expatiate along those lines. In the hope of eliciting a more lively discussion, however, I have chosen to speak instead to that other melancholy reality, and this one is permanent, because it is in the nature of the thing—I am referring to the inherent fragility of works of art, their precarious existence, their surprising vulnerability. For, from the moment of their creation, works of art are thrust into the physical world and all its vicissitudes.

In short, the reality is that works of art, by their very nature, are ineluctably on an entropic path of deterioration and ultimately disappearance.

Works of art are ineluctably on an entropic path of deterioration and ultimately disappearance.

Take the example of Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew and the Angel, once in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. The sweetest of angels who guides the hand of a totally bemused Matthew with the tips of his fingers, expressing ineffable tenderness, is one of those unforgettable genial inventions that stays with one forever, in this instance, only in our