I'd be interested in knowing how many, if any, of the layoffs that occur at museums involve security staff as compared to professional staff. I am finding that most museums are currently ADDING security staff, whereas in the past, under conditions that do not involve homeland security threats, when cost cutting was required, the security department has traditionally taken the largest hit. This is usually on the theory that if visitorship drops, they need fewer guards. We all know that the risk increases with fewer people in the galleries but this doesn't seem logical to some museum managers faceing the the need to solve financial problems quickly. So it would be useful for those of us who track this sort of thing to know if any of the job cuts referenced at the two museums who are cutting jobs involve guards (or security managers or gallery attendants) and how this compares percentage-wise to other staff cuts. If they do involve guards, this might be ill-timed since most museum are increasing security. It would be interesting to know if these museums added security staff and cut others for a net decrease in staff. In other words, did the increased security demands result in the need to cut professional staff? It would be interesting to know if museums that are cutting security staff--if any are--are first compensating by adding an appropriate amount of alternate security methods such as CCTV or are closing an extra day, etc. I have a real hard time convincing museums that they need both guards and electronics so that they have a cushion and can cut a few guards in a crisis or disaster without a serious loss of security. Many, forced with the need to cut in the past, addressed electronic system upgrades only after they made the cuts as they were not proactive in upgrading electronics when they were financially healthy as opposed to waiting until they were in trouble. It is also important to note that in nearly 100% of the museums where I recommend adding four or more guard positions, the Human Resources department asks for more HR staff on the theory that it takes more people in their department to recruit, process and maintain a larger museum staff. It would be very interesting to know if any of the cuts in these museums involved HR personnel since, if their theory is correct, they now need fewer people to maintain the reduced staff levels and should lay off one or more of their people until just prior to calling the others back.
Thanks Steve Keller Museum Security Consultant
Science Museum's 'dumb down' row
Blueprint would let Burger King and Starbucks turn national asset into a theme park, say critics. Robin McKie reports
Directors of the Science Museum in London have drawn up controversial plans to turn the popular attraction into a high-tech theme park with shops, fast-food outlets and coffee bars.
more: http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,610329,00.html
Space science takes aim at a ruined Monet
By Eugenie Samuel, Globe Correspondent, 12/4/2001
A fire-blackened painting by Claude Monet could be restored to its former blue-and-green glory thanks to technology from an unexpected source - NASA.
The painting is a late work from Monet's ''Waterlilies'' series, one of the giant canvases that the artist painted in the early 1900s at Giverny in France. It was hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York when fire swept through the building in 1958, injuring 33 people and killing one. After the fire, curators were devastated to find that, although the painting's frame and canvas had survived, its surface was partly burnt and utterly blackened by the smoke.
Unable to restore the painting, the museum donated it to the Center for Conservation at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where it became a valuable asset for trying out new conservation techniques. Today, more than 40 years later, it remains black, one of the most valuable ruined paintings in the world.
''It was and is considered a total loss,'' said a conservator at the Museum of Modern Art.
Now comes a glimmer of hope. Researchers at NYU are talking to engineers Sharon Miller and Bruce Banks at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland about the possibility of vaporizing the soot and char by blasting the painting's surface with atomic oxygen - a technique used by NASA to simulate the ravages of orbit on a spaceship's skin. To help NASA better protect its spacecraft, Banks and Miller developed a technique to test materials by bombarding them with oxygen atoms. The oxygen bombardment simulates a trip through low-Earth orbit - where solar radiation splits atmospheric oxygen from its stable two- atom molecules into highly reactive single-oxygen atoms that quickly eat away at a spacecraft's surface.
They test materials in a low-pressure chamber where atomic oxygen is created by a placing a high electric field across a mixture of molecular oxygen, or O2, and helium. The helium stops the atomic oxygen from quickly recombining back into O2.
With NASA under pressure to raise funds by finding civilian uses for space technology, Banks and Miller turned their attention to another possible use for their powerful oxidizing technique - cleaning up paintings. The atomic oxygen, they reasoned, could vaporize the top layer of matter without harming the pigments underneath.
They designed a small device that produces a beam of atomic oxygen and helium about one-eighth of an inch wide and works at atmospheric pressure. ''It's like an airbrush,'' Miller said. Conservators can use the device for close work on a specific spot on a painting, just as they would usually work with swabs and brushes.
In 1998, Miller and Banks used their technique to remove a lipstick ''kiss'' someone applied to ''The Bathtub,'' an Andy Warhol painting, during a reception at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Cleaning off every last particle of lipstick took several hours of atomic oxygen exposure, with Miller constantly monitoring the reflected light from the paint underneath to ensure that no damage was occurring.
''I was very pleased with the treatment,'' said Ellen Baxter, acting chief conservator at the Carnegie Museum of Art, which includes the Andy Warhol Museum.
In fact, Baxter found the treatment worked almost too well. Particles of normal airborne grime and dust were wiped away along with the lipstick, leaving a super-clean white patch where the stain had been. Fearful of using the new technology to clean the rest of the painting, Baxter decided instead to dirty the white spot deliberately, using a thin watercolor gray.
''It's back to being exhibitable, which it wasn't before,'' Baxter said.
Invited by a student early last year, Banks and Miller began talking to conservators at NYU about testing their technique on the ruined Monet. Their work on other fire-damaged paintings suggested their device could totally oxidize soot from the smoke damage as well as dark particles of charred binder - the part of the paint that provided glueyness. But the paint's color, now lost in the blackened surface, would be unaffected. ''Most pigments are metal oxides in their highest oxidation state, so they can't be oxidized further,'' Miller said.
Last week at the Materials Research Society Conference in Boston, the team reported that tests on paint chips taken from a corner of the painting were a success. The paint chips the team treated went from black to Monet's blues and greens. Right now, the painting looks almost entirely black, but Miller said that if the oxygen stream were applied across the full surface of the painting, the ''Waterlilies'' could become viewable again.
NYU's curators, however, have not decided whether to go ahead with a full restoration attempt.
They may be chastened by previous controversial restorations. Starting in 1980, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Florence was cleaned using a novel solvent designed to remove upper layers of dirt. The immediate effect was to brighten the colors and edges of figures in the fresco, but many conservators now believe the solvent also removed upper layers of paint applied by Michelangelo. ''In my opinion, we lost about 20 percent of the work,'' said James Beck, director of ArtWatch International based in New York City and professor of Art History at Columbia University.
Beck also noted an overzealous cleaning of Hans Holbein's 1533 painting, ''The Ambassadors,'' at the London National Gallery, after which lost paint had to be replaced by overpainting by modern conservators.
Such controversies breed caution among curators. ''It's like having an operation: The doctors always want to do it, but you can have a choice,'' Beck said.
For now, NYU's conservators are remaining silent. Margaret Holben Ellis, the director of the Center for Conservation, indicated to the magazine New Scientist last week and to the Globe this week that she does not want to have a public discussion about the fate of the painting. The student who invited the NASA team has been told not to speak publicly about her work, and in internal discussions between NASA and NYU, university representatives rejected the idea that NASA should even publicize their research on the Monet paint chip.
Miller acknowledged that the procedure is hardly risk-free. Although Monet normally worked with pigmented metal oxides, there's always a chance that he might have uncharacteristically applied an organic pigment somewhere in the painting, which could get vaporized along with the soot. There's also the fact that the surface is deeply charred, and if too much of the burnt binder is vaporized by the technique, the pigmented particles won't be held firmly to the surface. In that case, conservators would have to reapply binder in a light spray - a serious step, though one that has been done successfully before. In 1997, Miller delighted the congregation of the St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, when she used this method to restore two 19th-century oil paintings damaged by fire. ''It didn't affect the impasto,'' she said, referring to the texture of the paint. These were valuable paintings, though not when compared with the lost Monet; other ''Waterlilies'' paintings have sold at auction for $5 million to $20 million.
The Globe's conservation source at the Museum of Modern Art remains skeptical the painting could ever be salvaged. ''That's why it's no longer in this collection,'' the source said.
Yet Ellen Baxter's experience with the Warhol painting shows it can be worthwhile for conservators to be daring. Baxter said NYU conservators should be encouraged by the fact that atomic oxygen only removes particles; unlike many conservation techniques, it doesn't involve adding anything that could be considered a contaminant by later generations.
''Maybe with the Monet,'' Baxter said, ''this would at least take off some of the worst of the damage and give them options for the future.''
This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 12/4/2001. http://www.boston.com/