Lost to museums? Changing media, their worlds, and performance

From the perspective of museums and conservation, where does a work lie, how and where is it? This essay sets out to analyse Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals exhibited in the form of an augmented reality at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, MA. With the help of this and further examples, it argues that the changeable character of artworks does not comply with the traditional museum and its techniques of musealisation that privilege the idea of artworks as objects manifest in a physical matter. The traditional functionality of a museum has therefore been challenged. Accepting the changeable nature of artworks, contemporary conservation does not return artworks to their past condition but actively takes part in their actualisation on the basis of the archive. Further artworks by Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik are understood in terms of their duration, slow and fast, while the museum and conservation acquire a particular relation to time.