The damage done by incompetent bureaucracy at Lascaux

Some of the best paint­ings in the world were made long before the begin­ning of recorded his­tory. Not all pre­his­toric art is great, but some of it is as bril­liant and evoca­tive as any art from any era. The cave art at Las­caux is an par­tic­u­larly inspired example.

Over at his excel­lent Illus­tra­tion Art blog, David Apatoff has a post—“Lunatics and Bureau­crats”—about var­i­ous ways in which peo­ple dam­age art. One of his exam­ples is the dam­age the French gov­ern­ment has done to the images at Las­caux via an ill-planned air con­di­tion­ing sys­tem and var­i­ous attempts to fix it while cov­er­ing their asses from any assess­ment of blame.

A per­son named Lau­rence Beasley runs an orga­ni­za­tion devoted to sav­ing what can be saved at Las­caux. I would strongly rec­om­mend that you sign the peti­tion, or even donate some cash, to sup­port her cause.