What does the future hold for today's art works that employ ephemeral materials or rapidly obsolescent components?

Here is Stedelijk conservator Kees Herman Aben's description of what the Amsterdam museum must contend with each time it wants to exhibit the Mario Merz igloo Dal Miele Alle Ceneri (From Honey to Ashes, 1984) that is in its permanent collection:

Dal Miele Alle Ceneri comes unassembled with a tubular aluminium frame and supporting iron bars, forty-seven tablets or panels of beeswax on gauze, six steel sheets, two fir-cones covered in wax, machine parts and the head of an antelope.... It takes at least two people a full working day to put up the igloo. There are fifteen pages of instructions, complete with drawings and photos.

Similar instructions were translated into a form to create Jonathon Dady’s Construction Drawings 02: 2003 by Sarah Thomas, a giant ephemeral drawing erected in scaffolding outside the Art Gallery Of South Australia.

As the range of forms and materials used by artists has expanded, so have the demands on the individuals and institutions that collect con...