photographs not only proliferate in a way that paintings don’t but are, in a
certain sense, aesthetically indestructible. Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” in
Milan hardly looks better now; it looks terrible. Photographs, when they get
scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded still look good; do often look
better. (In this, as in other ways, the art that photography does resemble is
architecture, whose works are subject to the same inexorable promotion through
the passage of time; many buildings, and not only the Parthenon, probably look
better as ruins.)
