Friday, December 1

Terioration

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I've heard that daVinci's Last Supper began deteriorating only months after it was finished. Apparently the north wall of the monk's refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan was not entirely hospitable to the oil-and-tempera based medium the master used to paint the masterpiece.
Ironic then that this wall scribble is maybe a decade old on the southern wall beneath a railroad bridge going into Lancaster. While it rarely gets direct rain or sunlight, it's otherwise completely exposed to the temperature and humidity shifts of our part of the world. Yet it's still as bright and uncracked as it came out of the spray cans. Just as roaches will survive an atomic blast, grafitti will probably build the stories of the Fourth Millenium's archeologists. Don't you wonder what they'll conclude about us from these sort of things?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Leonardo was a genius as artist, but a dilettante what regards craftsmanship. You can see it in all of his work, even the paintings. They blacken almost faster as they can be restored :)

Concerning graffiti, about a year ago I finished a map for the game "Unreal Tournament 2004" (one of those first person shooters that debauch our youths and invariably force them to run amok with the guns of their parents), that used many of them as wall decoration. The setting was somehow rundown, industrial, but see for yourself.

At that time I actively searched for grafitti and actualy had trouble finding some. I mostly resorted to images taken from webshots.com ... hmmm ... something I probably would not do anymore. Not that any of them had any artistic appeal, but still, I should have asked.

Of course, as soon as the map was finished, I began to stumble over grafitti all the time. But that's what life is, isn't it?