Alexandra Kirtley on Lost Skills and Ethics in Jewelry Conservation

With conversations around sustainability growing louder each day, the conservation of an antique object is the embodiment of sustainable practice itself," writes The Magazine ANTIQUES, framing object care as the deliberate extension of an existing maker's work and narrative. That argument sits at the center of a February 17, 2026 feature by Urvashi Lele, which places jewelry conservation alongside antiques and decorative arts as a front line for both craft preservation and ethical debate.

Lele spoke with leading experts to explore "why craft skills are disappearing, and what we can do," and she quotes Alexandra Kirtley, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts, to sharpen the stakes. Kirtley "believes that the study and presentation of art should always be evolving" and notes that "as our society changes, so does our art, and as a result, our methods of caring for it." Those lines frame a practical curatorial problem: matching the right conservation skill set to each object.

Kirtley emphasizes the "importance of understanding the types of skills needed to bring the right talent to a conservation project," a point that reverberates through debates over restoration versus conservation. Lele’s interviews identify that ethical dimension as a distinct thread: deciding when to stabilize patina and original fabric, and when to intervene to restore function or aesthetics, requires not only technical knowledge but also respect for maker intent and provenance.

At a structural level, conservation scholars caution that persistent inequalities complicate those choices. A contribution on PMC notes plainly that "disparities in conservation remain stubbornly persistent" and insists "conservation conversations must be diversified so that the White, male, middle‐class voices of native English speakers ... do not predominate." The same piece calls for a shift "away from the Global North" and for "moving beyond abstract ideas and tokenistic actions to a material rebalancing of profoundly asymmetric power relations" as articulated by Temin in 2025.

Voices from environmental conservation offer a philosophical analogue that curators and jewelry conservators have begun to borrow. Sam Foster of ExposedWildlifeConservancy writes "Conservation shouldn't be a monologue. It has to be a conversation," and Partnerscapes argues that "listening is a key component of voluntary conservation," citing Stephen Covey's adage to "seek first to understand, then to be understood." Partnerscapes' landowner testimony that "trust was achieved when he believed that the partners understood where he was coming from" illustrates how multi-perspective partnerships can be structured in practice.

If object conservation is to remain both sustainable and ethical, the field will need more than lab techniques. It will require the interdisciplinary training the PMC paper advocates, awareness-building primers such as Miller et al., 2023 and Cardinale & Murdoch, 2025, and institutional willingness to redistribute power and expertise. As Sam Foster concludes in language equally urgent for museums and conservation labs, "Let’s stop shouting across the divide and start building the bridges we’ll need to survive together.