“Asking a curator if their museum has problems with mold is like asking if they have a sexually transmitted disease. It’s contagious, it’s taboo, and it carries the inevitable implication someone has done something naughty.”
[…]
“These molds—called xerophiles—can survive in dry, hostile environments such as volcano calderas and scorching deserts, and to the chagrin of curators across the world, they seem to have developed a taste for cultural heritage. They devour the organic material that abounds in museums—from fabric canvases and wood furniture to tapestries. They can also eke out a living on marble statues and stained-glass windows by eating micronutrients in the dust that accumulates on their surfaces. And global warming seems to be helping them spread.”
[…]
“That leaves conservators with only a basic tool kit for containing a fungal outbreak: quarantine infested objects, vacuum off the worst of the mold, and treat affected items with ethanol when possible. That’s what they ultimately had to do at the Roskilde Museum, the Danish institution where Bastholm found the xerophiles.”
Article is pretty interesting overall.
Technical_savoir on
Makes you think about all the private art collections that don’t even have museum grade controlled environments
temporalwanderer on
Should pump ozone into the collections at night or on weekends when nobody is around, and thoroughly vent before anyone shows up to work.
Fallatus on
We’re gonna have to start using modified or engineered bacteria and molds ourselves to combat the growing problems we’re facing; It’s pretty clear these days that attempting any kind of isolation from the natural world isn’t a viable tactic in the long run, for us or our preservation attempts.
Kinda obvious in hindsight, but money speaks; And we wish it’d shut up.
Hopefully they’ll figure this problem out before something important is lost; I imagine it is motivating and cheaper to find a solution than losing something irreplaceable.
4 Comments
“Asking a curator if their museum has problems with mold is like asking if they have a sexually transmitted disease. It’s contagious, it’s taboo, and it carries the inevitable implication someone has done something naughty.”
[…]
“These molds—called xerophiles—can survive in dry, hostile environments such as volcano calderas and scorching deserts, and to the chagrin of curators across the world, they seem to have developed a taste for cultural heritage. They devour the organic material that abounds in museums—from fabric canvases and wood furniture to tapestries. They can also eke out a living on marble statues and stained-glass windows by eating micronutrients in the dust that accumulates on their surfaces. And global warming seems to be helping them spread.”
[…]
“That leaves conservators with only a basic tool kit for containing a fungal outbreak: quarantine infested objects, vacuum off the worst of the mold, and treat affected items with ethanol when possible. That’s what they ultimately had to do at the Roskilde Museum, the Danish institution where Bastholm found the xerophiles.”
Article is pretty interesting overall.
Makes you think about all the private art collections that don’t even have museum grade controlled environments
Should pump ozone into the collections at night or on weekends when nobody is around, and thoroughly vent before anyone shows up to work.
We’re gonna have to start using modified or engineered bacteria and molds ourselves to combat the growing problems we’re facing; It’s pretty clear these days that attempting any kind of isolation from the natural world isn’t a viable tactic in the long run, for us or our preservation attempts.
Kinda obvious in hindsight, but money speaks; And we wish it’d shut up.
Hopefully they’ll figure this problem out before something important is lost; I imagine it is motivating and cheaper to find a solution than losing something irreplaceable.