Plastics conservation: a losing battle

In the early 1960s, curators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art noticed something funny about one of their modern-art sculptures: It smelled like vinegar. Worse, the once-clear plastic sculpture had begun browning like an apple, and cracks had appeared on its surface. By 1967, Naum Gabo's translucent, airy Construction in Space: Two Cones looked like Tupperware that had gone through the dishwasher too often.

Early cellulose acetate, in this case. Many early plastics are inherently unstable; they will hold up well for decades, only to start de-plasticizing catastrophically just when the artworks that use them have become highly valued museum centerpieces. And then there's not much to be done, except to keep them in cold storage to slow down the deterioration. From Slate (an article which is not so well fact-checked, however, as to avoid repeating the old exploding celluloid billiard ball myth).

Posted by David on July 6, 2009 10:24 AM