The 'but why?' link is fascinating: https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/not-fade-away-preventive-...
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> While these measures will not stop fading from occurring altogether, they will ensure that these world-famous prints fade so slowly that they will be seen by countless generations of visitors to the Museum in the future.
This trade-off is interesting, are we maximizing for number of people watching works? Or are we purely maximizing time? Because its not obvious to me that more people will see a work if it lasts 1000 more years but spends 80% of that time in storage, vs lasting 100 more years spending 0% of the time in storage.
Also lets say you go to the museum today and are lucky that it happens to be on display. But your friend travels to see it, it happens to be in 80% storage time, then the friend goes back home and dies without seeing it so that some future person that doesn't exist yet even can see it later without fading. Why is the future person more important than the current person, in a sense?
Storing it assumes a lot, that humanity will survive, that people will be interested in seeing it, that some fire isn't going to destroy their storage, etc. Meanwhile real life people would've seen it already. I don't have an answer, just questions though.
Arguably there's more educational value and more chance of a visitor serendipitously encountering something that speaks to them if the museum has a big set of prints rotated through, rather than a more static one. After all, even if you haven't ever seen an original of the Great Wave you almost certainly already know the image and it's likely already made most of the impact on you that it ever will...