In the end, what can we expect of artists working away in a disposable world? A world of McDonald’s hamburger wrappers, empty Coke cans and wandering discarded plastic detritus blowing through our streets… In a way, this art embraces impermanence, and ends up being truer to the world.

Thanks for your posting and link to the “Close Examination” exhibition, and your the mention of your book, as I have always seen a correlation between the work of the detective in the facts of an act, and the analysis of a painting. Questions about the actual execution of a painting are often more revealing as they address material and method rather than focusing on image or narrative.

Questioning whether a painting is a “fake” or “authentic” assumes that something is wrong the painting. But it also could be argued that to fool (fake) the viewer convincingly determines the degree of success of a depicted image, illusion, or idea. The question is then becomes one of authenticity. But as portrayed in Errol Morris’s intriguing essay, “Bamboozling Ourselves” authenticity might be as revealing of the structures of a history as those paintings that institutions acclaim as defining a culture.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/bamboozling-ourselves-part-1/

Restoration is more problematic as the painting will never be the same once the paint meets the air. One might argue that to move a work from its original location is an alteration of what the work was to represent in the context of place. The light, space, and surroundings can not be duplicated. To stand before Carvaggio’s “the Musician” in the Met in New York is a wondrous experience, but this is pale in comparison relative to standing before his “Crucifixion of Saint Peter” in the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Pololo in Rome.
And then there is the fact that time changes. As time changes material and context also changes meaning. Nothing remains as it was intended.

What might the the most relevant to these considerations is the moment. That is the merging of time in between that moment when the artist’s material touches the surface, and that moment when the viewer’s eye makes contact. This argument is interestingly portrayed in the opening chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” when academic analysis fails to recognize a fake, but the gut of an expert senses the forgery on a glance.