Don’t Mess With Rodin

Should museums be allowed to alter works of art in their care to create other works of art? James Fenton protests. “Tate ‘conservators’ have conspired with the exploding-shed-monger and brass-instrument-crusher, Cornelia Parker, to wrap Rodin’s marble group, ‘The Kiss’, in a mile of string. They should not have done this. It should be a principle of conservation that nothing unnecessary is done to an original work of art in a public collection, and I don’t care what the ‘conservators’ say about the care they took in executing this banal intervention. They wouldn’t have dared do this to Brancusi. They shouldn’t have done this to Rodin.”