Bev/Art comes first at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Bev/Art came through 6AM’s fourth cohort. We wish Christian, Håvard and the whole team the best of luck.

Bev/Art has been appointed to the Environmental Monitoring System Framework at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and came first in the evaluation.

The V&A is one of the most respected art and cultural institutions in the world. Winning a framework there is not a single sale. It is the museum deciding which system it trusts to sit alongside its collection, and then pointing other institutions at the same answer.

Put plainly: it means Bev/Art is now number 1 globally at environmental monitoring for art and cultural collections.

Why this is hard to win

Art does not tolerate much. Temperature, humidity and light swing a few points and paint lifts, wood moves, paper yellows. Conservators have monitored this for decades, but often with equipment that is awkward to place, tedious to read and impossible to act on quickly. Bev/Art builds environmental monitoring for collections that is actually easy to run, which is the whole difference between data existing and data being used.

Getting that past the conservation team at an institution of this size means the product held up against people who know exactly what they are looking at.

What happens next

The framework is published and available, and Bev/Art says UK institutions will hear more about how to apply it at their own sites.

Having the V&A set the reference point is a good place to be standing.

The news was announced on Bev/Art’s LinkedIn.