The copper housing of the Erco spotlight is exactly 104 degrees, a sharp, dry heat that bites into my palm as I wrench the fixture three degrees to the left. From 14 feet up on this motorized lift, the 14th-century Flemish tapestry looks less like a masterpiece and more like a decaying carcass. My job, according to the museum’s charter, is to illuminate it. But as I squint through the glare, focusing a narrow beam on a thread of indigo that shouldn’t be there-a stray hair, perhaps, or a fiber from a botched restoration 144 years ago-I feel the weight of a different truth. Every photon I project is a tiny, microscopic bullet. We call it ‘presentation,’ but in the silent language of chemistry, it is a slow-motion execution.
Down on the marble floor, Marcus, the lead curator, is regaling a group of donors with a story. I catch the tail end of a sentence about ‘radiocarbon dating and social anxiety.’ He punctuates it with a sharp, nasal laugh. I don’t get the joke. I never do.
– The Curator and the Joke
I lean over the rail and offer a performative, breathless chuckle that echoes off the vaulted ceiling. It’s easier to pretend to understand the humor of historians than to admit that I find their obsession with ‘saving’ things deeply suspicious. Marcus looks up, waves
