Eighteenth-century France witnessed a proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France (Penn State University Press, 2024), written by BC Assistant Professor of Art History Oliver Wunsch, links these artistic practices to the economic and social conditions that enabled them, revealing how the rise of consumer culture fundamentally transformed the relationship between art, time, and value. Drawing on sources ranging from eighteenth-century artists’ writings to twenty-first-century laboratory analyses, A Delicate Matter challenges the art historical tendency to see decay as little more than an impediment to research, instead showing how physical instability played a critical role in establishing art’s meaning and purpose. Wunsch has a background as a painter and printmaker, and much of his research looks at the history of artistic techniques, with a focus on European and American art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He spoke about his book in this video from BC Libraries.