The Conservator occupies an uncertain position in the art world. His interventionist role challenges the intense relationship with objects fostered by the Romantic imagination, and cherished by arts professionals, i.e. curators, administrators, art historians, dealers, and critics. Moreover the implications of conservation are potent reminders of the instability of our accumulated heritage, which as we turn increasingly to the past for reassurance, shakes the security of refuge from the present offered by the 'patina' of age. So the conservator is an isolated figure, belonging neither to art nor to science, nor to precisely past or present; he is the Jeremiah of the art world. -- AATA