Jeff (et al.) --
But the Mona Lisa and a golf course are not at all alike, are they?
One is the creation of a single person. When it was finished, it was finished. The very nature of this type of creation is that it cannot be changed by anyone other than its creator. That's the rule of the game, and rightly so.
A golf course, by contrast, is a collaborative and dynamic thing. By its very nature -- because of its setting, IN nature, and because of its interaction with golfers -- it changes. It CANNOT be preserved exactly as it was at the time of its "completion," because it never HAS a completion. It is forevermore a work-in-progress.
I would be very surprised to learn that any golf-course architect, ever, thought that any of his creations would be or should be treated as a museum piece. (And if any of them did think that, I'd have told him he was a little big in the head!)
A golf course, it seems to me, is less like a painting, or a novel, or a symphonic score than it's like a park, or a building, or a newspaper, or pretty much any business anywhere -- all of which change, and must change, with the passage of time, as the world around them changes.
Of those many creative things that it's like, a golf course may be most like a building -- a functional blend of artistry and craftsmanship; out in the world, and inevitably affected by natural and human forces. Occasionally, of course, we decide that a building is important enough, in the history of architecture or in the history of its location, that it must be preserved in a form as much as possible like the form it had when its original architect stepped away from it.
Is that what we want, in the golf world: an International Trust for Historic Golf Course Preservation?
Maybe it is. Maybe Tom MacWood has it right: "There are courses ... that should never be touched.... They should be preserved for the world to study and learn from, blemishes and all."
It's pretty to think so, isn't it? (Yes, it is. What true golfer with any sensitivity to history -- that's redundant, I think -- would not be enchanted by the idea of playing courses exactly as they were a century ago?) But I, for one, can't imagine how we'd decide which courses those are, and how -- even if we could agree on a list of Courses That Must Be Preserved -- we could keep them from changing.
Nature will have her way over Committees and Trusts.
(Sorry for the rambling. Maybe there's a nugget of something worthwhile hiding in here.)