Subject: Certification
Like most of you, I have received my ballot to vote on certification. Since I have been concerned about this issue for many years, I feel it is important that AIC members consider this issue carefully. While I think it was helpful that the AIC Newsletter printed articles by Podany and Weisser in the latest issue and provided a list of others who are mainly in support of certification, It was unfortunate that they did not include articles which have appeared in the Newsletter and in other venues by myself and people like Jack Thompson who have been critical of certification. Perhaps the central point in my continued reservation to certification is the rush. Certification should proceed after a field has reached a point of critical review and maturity where it has produced a large number of theoretical works, reviews of methods and especially textbooks which define and characterize the discipline. We have only begun to achieve this. We have few textbooks at all and, though the IIC has just begun a journal devoted to reviews of methods, these are demonstrating by their form and limitations the lack of a comprehensive critical literature or even an agreed methodology for understanding what is the goal of practice or success in treatments. In his new book Caple has achieved a good start in this process and I urge everyone who can to get a copy of this book. It think it can be a starting point for the creation of such a methodology. A second point which concerns me is why now? What are we trying to certify and what ends are we trying to achieve? There are other organizations for conservators and restorers to join, like the Antique Restorers of America. Some of these organizations provide referrals like the AIC, access to literature through their web site, like the AIC, web pages for their members, all at a cost less that AIC membership. What can the AIC certification provide members with that these organizations cannot? It seems to me that the arguments over improved public regard, especially when the AIC used accountants as an example is surely defunct now and rather ludicrous in retrospect considering Enron, etc. But even the comparison with medicine is problematic. Doctors demonstrated over the 19th century the success of their methods (allopathic, and "Heroic" medicine) over other forms, some like Homeopathy still in existence today. They did so by association with emergent science and the antiseptic conditions invented in the hospital. This provided the basis for a comparison with other forms of medicine which resulted in licensing. This then led to governmental sanction on the practice of medicine. Later it led to massive lawsuits for malpractice as the body of literature which medicine had produced provided the lawyers with standards to hold practitioners to in daily outcomes. Is this what we want? Certification is an idea that seems like an attractive goal, but it requires us to decide if conservation is a craft or a science and to separate those practices and people in a deliberate and finite way which are acceptable or not. This means going farther than the existing code of ethics, it means clearly and definitively saying what practices and methods are not acceptable and which are. Are we ready to do that? I think not and I will vote against this premature effort. Certainly there will come a time in the future when we will have reached this point, but let us do the work now to make that transition set on a firm an d understandable foundation. Niccolo Caldararo Director and Chief Conservator Conservation Art Service *** Conservation DistList Instance 16:39 Distributed: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 Message Id: cdl-16-39-016 ***Received on Friday, 6 December, 2002