Art is long, and life is short, according to an old Roman saying, but sometimes art doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain: the canvas warps, the metal bends, and the paper turns brown. New artworks may look like old works too soon, leaving their buyers feeling as though they’ve been had. In fiction, we have the works of Vonnegut’s Rabo Karabekian, whose paintings made with Sateen Dura-Lux (which promised to “outlive the smile on the Mona Lisa”) self-destruct. In real life, similar tales abound. One collector brought back to New York City gallery owner Martina Hamilton a painting she had purchased there by the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum that looked as though the “painting was falling off the canvas,” the gallerist told Observer.

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Art doesn’t come with warranties, and state consumer protection statutes only cover utilitarian objects. Art is sold “as is” by galleries and artists. (Can you imagine Consumer Reports reviewing art?) Still, dealers hope to maintain the goodwill of their customers, and artists don’t want to develop a reputation for shoddy work. It is not fully clear, however, what responsibility artists bear their when it comes to conservation, especially after a piece has been sold one or more times. It is particularly the case for artists who purposefully use ephemeral materials in their art (bee pollen, banana peels, lard, elephant dung, leaves, mud, moss and newspaper clippings, to name just a few examples).

Nerdrum, who is known for formulating his own paints (and constructing his own frames), was contacted by Hamilton about the deteriorating painting, and he directed the dealer to offer the buyer her choice of other works by him at the gallery in the same price range. The collector, however, didn’t want any other Nerdrum painting in the gallery, so the artist rehired the same model he had used originally and painted the entire image anew. The entire incident took a year to resolve.

Nerdrum isn’t the only artist who will try to make amends for work he or she created that doesn’t hold up. Manhattan painter David Novros was asked in 2006 what to do about a 1965 acrylic lacquer painting in the Menil Collection in Houston that had extensive “cracks, canyons and fissures” all over the surface, and he decided “to remake the work with the same materials as before.” The work, 6:30, is now dated ‘1965/2006.’ It’s not the first time this kind of thing has happened to Novros. In 1990, the Museum of Modern Art came to him about a 1966 painting in its collection whose canvas had discolored and was affecting the handmade plywood stretcher, and his solution was to scrape off the old paint and put on new. The museum dates the work, titled VI.XXXII, as ‘1966 (repainted in 1990).’

If alive and........

© Observer