This problem arises with new acuteness in the contemporary era, for artworks are today conserved in digital formats that fail to avoid the wearing of time. In order to grasp which procedures allow digital heritages to be transmitted all the same, the concept of process defined by Hannah Arendt is analyzed for its applicability to the work of Christian Boltanski, whose interest in the conservation of digital archives extends only so far as they are also instruments of action and interaction.
Yet, the destiny of these works was that they remain undiminished throughout the ages, and their deterioration is fortuitous. In the history of Western thought, works of art are thus objects destined to endure, whence the idea that they are connected with a principle of permanence.
This is a principle, a postulate, in the sense that though it may fail to be evident the proposition is no less necessary. What is the practical law governing this proposition? Nothing less than that which governs the humanity of humans. In contrast with the fleeting nature of action or of work subordinated to the satisfaction of constantly recurring needs, once they have been produced, human artifacts are equipped with their own lives.
Able to withstand attack from the voracity of humans, they form the base of a stable world that stands between humanity and nature, and confronted with which the subject discovers his or her place. Their permanence makes them a fixed point from which movement is no longer a permanent flux, but becomes signifying, and through which human life becomes existence. Because of their outstanding permanence, works of art are the most intensely worldly of all tangible things [ Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the world of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings.
It is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the permanence of art [ Made of human hands, they are the reality of the deep yearning for a world that does not change. Their duration cannot thus be separated from the task that art can and should carry out: that of offering a possible refuge to a humanity traumatized by the thought of its finite nature.
