2022年全国硕士研究生招生考试英语（一）试题 真题答案！(5)

And sometimes, it"s not the artist"s fault. In the 1960s, the Italian artist Picro Gilardi began to create hundreds of bright, colorful foam pieces. Those pieces included small beds of roses and other items as well as a few dozen "nature carpets"—large rectangles decorated with foam pumpkins, cabbages, and watermelons. He wanted viewers to walk around on the carpets—which meant they had to be durable.
Unfortunately, the polyurethane foam he used is inherently unstable. It"s especially vulnerable to light damage, and by the mid-1990s, Gilardi"s pumpkins, roses, and other figures were silting and crumbling. Museums locked some of them away in the dark.
So van Oosten and her colleagues worked to preserve Gilardi"s sculptures. They infused some with stabilizing and consolidating chemicals. Van Oosten calls those chemicals "sunscreens" because their goal was to prevent further light damage and rebuild worn polymer fibers. She is proud that several sculptures have even gone on display again, albeit sometimes beneath protective cases.