Tomorrow night at Vollum Lounge at Reed College (3202 SE Woodstock, 7 pm, free), Jim Coddington, the chief conservator at the Museum of Modern Art (and Reed alum), will lecture about the current state of art conservation. While on the surface this might sound like a dry talk about fixing paint crackles and removing fingerprints from fancy sculptures, I predict it’ll be a whole lot sexier than that. Artists are now working with unprecedented materials: Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde-d shark comes to mind, as do Charles Long’s silly-putty-like sculptures, and Tom Friedman’s shredded paper masterpieces. But also—for the past 30 years, artists have been exploring new technologies as quickly as they come out, and as we know, these become obsolete just as fast. So what of web art, CD-ROMS, and all other digital media? How to preserve those? Likewise—what about artists who create site-specific works? In many cases, ephemerality is part of the point, but not always. SFMoMA recently “bought” Matthew Barney’s wall drawing which he made by rappelling the building’s interior architecture and scrawling from a percipitous height. That piece was far enouh out of the way that it could stay where it was an be an unobstrusive part of the permanent collection, but that’s not always the case. Museums are struggling like hell to wrestle with these issues, and there’s probably not a person in the country better suited to discuss them than MoMA’s Jim Coddington.

Tom Friedman’s self portrait as a motorcycle accident victim in cut paper: How do you conserve, archive, and store that?