In 2010, a landmark exhibition opened at the Louvre Museum. Over 300 priceless exhibits, some never seen in public before, detailed the long mercantile and religious history of the Kingdom. “Roads to Arabia” was a massive cultural success and moved on to La Caixa Foundation in Barcelona, the Hermitage Museum in Petersburg and finally the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. It will be at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. from Nov. 15. In January 2012 the British Museum in London hosted its “Hajj” exhibition, an collection of artifacts explaining the cultural values behind the annual pilgrimage to a wide audience. The value of the artifacts on display in exhibitions such as these is impossible to price sensibly. They have an insurance value in most cases plucked out of the air, but their loss to a culture and human history simply cannot be priced. How would you price a one-off hand written Qur'an produced 1,200 years ago? In Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities is actively promoting the raising of both local and international awareness, but with this commendable zeal come problems of a unique nature. It is not, however, just at the high-profile government and public exhibition level that these problems apply; what goes for national collections applies equally to private collections. The connection between the two is that many national exhibits have items on long-term loans from private collections that could reasonably be considered part of a country's national heritage. This year's Haj exhibition in the British Museum included significant material from Saudi Arabia, including a “seetanah” that covers the door of the Ka'ba as well as other historic and contemporary artifacts from key museums in the Kingdom. Other objects came from major public and private collections in the UK and around the world, among them the Khalili Family Trust. It was only a handful, if any at all, of the visitors who, while looking at the exhibits, wondered how they got to the exhibition or thought about what was involved in keeping the objects in good condition and transporting them perhaps tens of thousands of kilometers from odd corners of the world. These exhibitions and many others that travel between the world's great museums are always at the risk of thieves. A more immediate risk, however, and one that is present every second of the day is that of deterioration of the exhibit. With metal and stone, both fairly solid substances, deterioration is slow but other substances, paints, fabrics and paper for example, are usually very much more sensitive. If a collection of exhibition travels, then a phenomenally accurate and continuous monitoring system that tracks the whereabouts, condition and storage conditions of the pieces is industry standard. Any variation in the environmental conditions in the transport crates could ruin an artifact. In the unlikely event that there is damage during transport or, as is more often the case, an object is so delicate that it needs some degree of conservation before it can be moved, then a conservation and restoration team within any transport company that moves art is an absolute requirement. Add to that the fact that many objects are on loan to museums from private collectors, the vicissitudes of international transport and the possibilities of damage that this involves, and the size of the challenge becomes daunting. What the public sees and wonders at is the final stage in a complex and incredibly technical process of moving perhaps a national treasure or a cultural icon from one place to another. Even to pick up a 1,200 year old parchment is fraught with possible hazards from mechanical damage to contamination by atmosphere or acid from skin contact. One of the leading companies in the industry of transporting art and indeed other cultural treasures of great value is the Spanish company SIT. Moving works of art is both science and art and each move has its own unique challenges. Some are fairly easy – little more than packing a sturdy but valuable object in a tough travelling case and stacking it securely in a container. Items such as historical paintings by great artists, a fragile 2,000 year-old document weighing a few grams or a marble carving weighing several tons, are very different challenges and present unique problems. Major museums often have their own packing departments for storage in their own secure warehouses. However, the very nature of many items of great historical and financial value demands specialist treatment. SIT is one example. Although partly a specialist transport company, it is also a privately accessible archive with all the esoteric skills needed to store, curate, catalogue, track, conserve, maintain and manage irreplaceable objets d'art. This involves extreme security – but also far more than that. Perhaps the most important aspect of storage is the environment in which a piece is kept. Each material – fabric, paper, wood, metal – has different requirements to prevent deterioration over time. Climate, humidity and temperature control, perhaps in an inert gas such as nitrogen, might be best for one object. For a private collector to build a storage facility to accommodate a whole collection with the multiple environments that this would involve would be possible, but hugely expensive. In the case of SIT for example, the investment in multiple environments on the grand scale allowed many collections to be stored, with every piece in an appropriate environment. Storage is one aspect of collecting; maintenance and conservation are necessary accompanying needs. A relatively simple example might be a classic car – it needs careful regular if limited maintenance to keep it in flawless and working condition. Brooklands Museum in Surrey, UK is a definitive example of the genre. More complex tasks and esoteric skills are needed, for example preventing the acid in the paper of rare documents from gradually dissolving them. Fabrics can and are on occasion eaten by microscopic creatures and also affected by the chemicals that kill them; conservation is full of such rather expensive contradictions. Keeping track of the location of each piece and to whom it belongs is the next essential. The financial and sometimes diplomatic implications of misplacing an object could be enormous. Imagine for a moment a conversation along the lines of, “Where are the Elgin Marbles?” with the reply, “Er, I don't quite remember, I had them a moment ago.” With the economies of scale, sophisticated tracking and logistic systems can be used, most of which would stress the budget of many collectors. If a collector – private or institutional – wishes to lend pieces to a museum or gallery for example, then pieces have to be transported perhaps over considerable distances, by several means of transport and through varying climatic conditions. This is often the responsibility of the borrower and is where the transport side of SIT comes in. Creating specialist packing cases to repeat the storage environment and then protect a piece from damage en route is a specialist field. The package may be as simple as a soft-lined crate with an object bolted to the floor as in the case of a car. However, transporting a piece in a gas and climate controlled box with air conditioning, high security and fire prevention systems that if used will not damage the pieces, is a different order of challenge. Extreme examples might be the Picasso Guernica which SIT moved and mounted in the Prado gallery in Madrid or the 8th century Ma'il Qur'an, one of the oldest known, which was on display in the UK Haj exhibition. Once on the move to an exhibition, an owner will surely want to know where the objects are and how they are being looked after. With the advent of wi-fi and GPS this has become much easier and is standard practice for SIT. Their “Museum Tracker” is a portable device, about the size of a mobile phone and looks very much like one. It has a touch sensitive full color screen, a keyboard, a built-in bar code scanner, a built-in RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) scanner and a wireless connection to the Collection Management System. The whole thing links directly into the company's database so an owner can keep in touch from any location. Gone are the Indiana Jones days of storing artifacts in nailed-up crates in vast, dusty warehouses somewhere in a desert. Enter clinically clean controlled environments with secure, “virtual access” by the owner of the objects at any time. This investment in storage, curatorship and maintenance of valuable pieces will not in the fullness of time prevent the loss of some pieces of our history. However, it has and will slow the pace of deterioration to an incredible degree, such that pieces, particularly if made of organic materials, will be available to future generations of historians perhaps millennia from now. Public and private collectors, almost completely unknown to the public at large, entrust their collections and in effect, our history, to the technological and conservation skills of companies such as SIT, very often with no thought of reward. It is their investment in history. – SG
