We often discuss heritage as if it were a natural category: there are things that simply deserve to be preserved. An ancient building, a masterpiece, an archaeological site. As if the value resided within the object, awaiting recognition, and preservation consisted solely of ensuring that which possesses inherent worth is not lost.
The discipline dedicated to the study of heritage dismantled this notion some time ago, and it is prudent to bear this in mind when working—as we do at the foundation—on art and heritage projects. Laurajane Smith articulated this with a useful expression: the authorised heritage discourse. Her thesis is uncomfortable and difficult to refute: heritage value is not inherent to objects or places. It is determined. And those who determine it do so from a specific position, employing particular criteria and deliberate silences.
Conservation, viewed in this light, is not the preservation of something neutral: it is selection. First, one selects what deserves to be recognised as heritage and what does not. Subsequently, one selects the narrative told about it, how it is interpreted, funded, and transmitted. Two filters, and neither is innocent. Both distribute cultural authority and both produce exclusions.
One need only observe what typically passes the filter: the monumental, the ancient, the grandiose, the aesthetically recognisable, that which confirms a comfortable national or identity-based narrative. The usual suspects, so to speak. And what typically remains excluded: the everyday, the modest, the uncomfortable, the memory of those who lacked the power to record their own. The heritage of the victors is preserved almost automatically; that of others depends upon someone fighting for its recognition, often belatedly. The list of what we consider heritage today, which was once ignored—industrial architecture, popular cultures, silenced memories, sites of trauma—is proof that the filter did not capture an eternal value, but rather the taste and power of a specific moment.
There is a distinction here that interests me, as it connects with a theme I have been exploring in other texts. Declaring something heritage does not create its existence: the cathedral, the landscape, the tradition existed before any declaration. What the declaration creates is its public legitimacy, its protection, its right to represent the memory of a community. Recognition does not invent the object; it invents its capacity to narrate, to be defensible, to receive resources and care. And for that very reason, denying it—not recognising something as heritage—does not make it disappear, but leaves it exposed, without the protection that others enjoy.
To state this from within an institution that works with heritage is not an exercise in suspicion, but one of responsibility. Those who curate, restore, exhibit, or disseminate heritage do not manage something neutral: they participate, whether they intend to or not, in the decision regarding what a society remembers and what it allows to fall into oblivion. To feign that one is merely 'preserving what is valuable' is to conceal the most delicate aspect of the profession, which is precisely the act of selection.
And yet, that preservation is an act of selection is not unwelcome news. It is liberating news, provided it is accepted with honesty. If heritage is not a closed inventory dictated by the eternal value of things, but a living decision, then we may decide more effectively: by broadening participation in the selection process, reviewing what we have excluded, and making space for memories that the old filter discarded. Conservation ceases to be an act of passive stewardship and becomes what it always was without admitting it: a means of deciding, collectively, what is worth remembering. And that is a conversation that should be conducted in the open, rather than considered settled.
On the open conversation
This text is part of my sub-series Art and Society, which examines from within the sector what culture does and fails to do; here, that conserving heritage is always selecting, and that selecting is a decision with those responsible. If anyone wishes to intervene from the fields of conservation, museology, or heritage studies, the notebook remains open.
Sources
Smith, Laurajane. Uses of Heritage. Routledge, 2006.
Tunbridge, J. E. and G. J. Ashworth. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Wiley, 1996.
Harrison, Rodney. Heritage: Critical Approaches. Routledge, 2013.
Macdonald, Sharon. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. Routledge, 2009.