In our great age of increasing equality and mobility, where museums are free and travel is easy, prestigious art can finally be appreciated by everyone – rather than the small, wealthy elite who can afford to buy it. But in celebrating this, many people have wished to ignore the fact that such modern mass-tourism to shrines of cultural significance, like the Sistine Chapel or the Valley of the Kings, quite literally destroys the art within. The debate surrounding the democratisation of art is constantly in the press, yet we are forgetting art’s mortality. It cracks, breaks and flakes away; a process sped up a-hundred-fold by the presence of crowds. We have art at our fingertips, accessible through the click of a button. Yet this plethora of digital reproductions makes us crave authenticity all the more. Record-breaking numbers are cramming into museums, and the art world simply cannot take it.

The democratisation of the arts through film has had a massive boom in the past few years. National Theatre Live and Royal Opera House Live have gripped audiences across the country, and now it is the turn of museums. Describing itself as ‘the cinematic event of the year’, Vatican Museums 3D is a way to get up close and personal with one of the western world’s greatest collections – all from the comfort of a movie theatre. Directed by Marco Pianigiani, it is 70 minutes of epic panning shots, interspersed with ‘artistic’ dramatisations of men blowing marble dust into the air to signify the carving of a sculptor. Presenter, and director of the Vatican, Antonio Paolucci, periodically interjects with a piece of predictable drivel, as repeated shots of Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ slides across the screen. It is a gimmicky commercialist masterpiece, but might this also be the answer to the problems of preservation?

It is an open secret that the Vatican’s collection, most significantly the Sistine Chapel, is falling apart. In the 1980s a catastrophic restoration project was conducted on Michelangelo’s ceiling. Using an aggressive solvent, AB57, the restorers stripped away the waxy coating, created by over 500 years of candle use.

But in the process they removed the top layer of the painting, which Michelangelo applied both to seal the fresco and to add illusionistic effects. Some of the AB57 also seeped into the plaster and has slowly been eroding the fresco from the inside, causing white patches to appear of the surface. This barbaric project simultaneously destroyed the original work and exposed it to the disruption of the 20,000 tourists that are herded through the chapel each day. It is no wonder that small fragments of the fresco are breaking away from the wall to fall pathetically on the visitors below.

Naturally the Holy See has not confessed to this ill-advised sin against art but the gravity of the situation is starting to be felt within the Vatican. Only last month a statement was released about the installation of state-of-the-art air conditioning systems in the chapel to funnel out the air pollution brought by the ever-increasing influx of visitors. But this is not enough. If the tourist stream is not quelled, it may be too little too late. In this respect, Vatican Museums 3D could be seen as the first step to the reduction of tourists, who will no longer have to actually visit the Vatican, and therefore preserve its dying collection. After all, you get a better view of the Sistine Chapel ceiling on the silver screen than by craning your neck amongst the seething mass on the chapel floor. This view, however, is fundamentally flawed.

Firstly we must consider the birth of the VIP (very important painting). It is undeniable that the dissemination and democratisation of art through modern media has turned paintings into celebrities. People travel across the globe to see the Creation of Adam, not because they don’t know what it looks like, but so they can become a member of some cultural elite by being able to say they’ve experienced it “in the flesh”. The gimmick of replacing the actors’ names on the movie poster with “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Caravaggio” attests to this celebrity-like status. It turns the film into a marketing strategy, rather than an alternative to visiting, as more people than ever will want to say they have seen ‘the greatest art collection in history’ in person.

Secondly, people will not just accept virtual reality as a substitute. The human obsession with what is tangible has declined with the use of digital media, but it is debatable whether art appreciation will ever be entirely converted to a virtual universe. State of the art 3D graphics cannot replicate the physical experience of walking through the Papal palace or standing in front of Raphael’s School of Athens, just as Kenneth Clark’s BBC documentary Civilisation could not do it 50 years ago. The glorifying panoramas of the Sistine Chapel shown in the trailer will unfortunetly not satisfy people. Instead it will act as bait, luring tourists with the promise of sensory cultural experience – even if this sensory experience actually ends up being an elbow in the ribs in the midst of eager tourists, a child screaming and possibly a flake of fallen plaster to the head.

The Vatican Museum 3D will not lessen the flood of tourists, it will not save the Sistine Chapel, it will probably not even make that much money in the box-office. It will do nothing to preserve the art it glorifies. But at least we will have pretty moving pictures to remember what the greatest art collection in history once looked like.

3D The Vatican Museum is in cinemas now.