Museums Use New Tools to Fix Old Works: "John Singer Sargent's 'Madame X' developed strange tiny bumps under her right arm and along the back of her head. A set of drawings by Louis Comfort Tiffany was crumpled, frayed and stained by water and mold. The enamel on a fish pendant was not as old as it should have been, suggesting that the piece might be a fake.
With a collection exceeding two million works, the Metropolitan Museum of Art encounters such problems often enough to keep a staff of eight full-time scientists busy... The scientists have an arsenal of tests - from microscopy and X-rays to more complicated ones with names like X-ray fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy - to analyze just what an object (or the grime on its surface) is made of, how it was made and what can be done to repair or stabilize a problem."
Rather, Met: Art Scene Investigators, but that would be stretching the joke too far.
