I'm a bit of a philistine so please don't take this as more than cheap provocation, but would Rijks Museum basement burning down to cinders be such a loss if no one sees the collection anyway? Is art that's filed away (even for good reasons like future restorability) for lifetimes that precious?
Well a painting that nobody ever sees is functionally no different from a painting that's been burned down. However only one of those 2 is reversible, so in that sense it's still a loss.
A lot of the time, it isn't simply future restorability. Museums have limited space, and as stuffy and unchanging as they can seem, really do reflect the vision of current curators. Simply by math, a lot of pieces don't get selected for display, and they just hangout in the archive for whatever scholar/student/future curator might be interested.
Additionally, a lot of the art in the archive is by nature going to be stuff that might make sense to display in a dedicated exhibit, but less so in a general museum. By that, I mean that if you have a handful of Picasso canvases, along with 100 of his sketches, displaying all 100 sketches probably doesn't make sense unless you're doing a special Picasso exhibit.
In this way, the archive is important, and Rijks burning down would suck. Along the lines of your thinking, however, there is a ton of amazing art sitting in investors' basements and shipping containers that we might never see again, much of which we've already lost track of.
If something like this would occur, it would be comparable to the burning of the library of Alexandria. That's why digitizing the collection is such an important feat.
Art isn't only something that can be revered. Works of art are basically historical documents that contain a narrative of that period. It's not all self-portraits of people missing an ear or reclining nudes, even though they too contain a lot of information that is telling of the period they were made in.
Up until some two hundred years ago artists like painters and sculptors, were some of the few that could actually immortalize, or at least significantly prolong the normal lifespan of people, things or events.
I encourage anyone to take some time to go through these online collections. It's amazing what you'll learn about history by being inquisitive about the subject matter. I can also recommend the Arts & Culture project by Google, which already indexed a tremendous amount of the Rijksmuseum's catalogue.
> comparable to the burning of the library of Alexandria
While I will be the first to agree with you that paintings and other visual art is precious and worth keeping, it is not on the same level as books and knowledge. Comparing these is not doing justice to either one.
Nobody says the art needs to be kept there till end of universe. Also they could rotate them with the ones they show upstairs, ie during some thematic period instead of broad spectrum they have now. Obviously they'll probably never remove Night watch or Girl with a pearl earring (at least I hope so), but still a major temporary refresh could draw a lot of people.
Who says there won't be many more museums in 50 years? Or some other model which will result in more art being on display.
If Dutch culture budget gets in serious issues, they could finance museum survival also via sales of those.
The options what to do with it are almost endless and much better than just losing them.
