Question

Passage A
The modern consensus in art conservation champions a philosophy of minimal intervention, strictly separating the restorer's work from the original artist's hand. According to this purist paradigm, the historical integrity of an artwork is inextricably bound to its original material composition and the physical evidence of its journey through time. Over centuries, natural degradation—fading pigments, widespread craquelure, and the accumulation of atmospheric patina—becomes an integrated component of the object's authentic historical trajectory. Any attempt to seamlessly replace lost paint, reverse chemical changes, or obliterate the visible marks of age inherently falsifies this chronological record, substituting a speculative modern reconstruction for a genuine historical artifact. Consequently, strict contemporary conservation ethics dictate that any necessary aesthetic restorations must be visually distinguishable from the original upon close inspection, and must employ materials that are entirely reversible. The primary, overriding obligation of the conservator is to stabilize the object and arrest further decay. In this view, the artwork functions foremost as a primary historical document; aesthetic legibility is secondary to ensuring that future generations can distinguish the hand of the Renaissance master from the interventions of a twenty-first-century technician.

Passage B
The prevailing orthodoxy in museum conservation, which increasingly fetishizes material authenticity and historical documentation, often betrays the very artworks it claims to rigorously protect. By insisting that restorations remain conspicuous and that the ravages of time constitute an inviolable part of a painting's meaning, modern conservators frequently subject the viewer to a discordant and entirely unintended aesthetic experience. We must remember that a masterwork is not merely a static collection of historical molecules to be cataloged; it is a meticulously orchestrated visual illusion intended to evoke specific emotional and cognitive responses in the observer. When natural resins yellow unevenly, or when fugitive pigments shift dramatically in hue—turning a vibrant sky into a muddy expanse—the structural and tonal coherence of the artist's original vision is effectively shattered. An approach to restoration that refuses to employ modern, stable synthetic materials to fully and seamlessly reintegrate the image—driven by an academic fear of "falsifying" the physical record—prioritizes a scholarly fixation on material provenance over the phenomenological reality of the artwork. True fidelity to an artist requires restoring the visual harmony and affective power that they originally designed, even if achieving that visual restoration necessitates intervening in ways that permanently and seamlessly alter the physical artifact.

Based on the passages, the author of Passage A would be most likely to argue that the approach to conservation advocated by the author of Passage B rests on which of the following flawed assumptions?