re: No one can remember art that isn't preserved.
A vast amount of art is being digitized. Again, speaking as someone who only saw the Louvre for the first time last summer, a digitized painting loses a lot in translation. But it's better than nothing.
In the novel "When World's Collide," (not the movie) the spaceship taking the chosen few off the doomed Earth had its outer walls packed with books and works of art. It is oddly comforting to know that it is now possible to take almost all the great written and painted works of humanity in digital form and pack them in a large steamer trunk. Not to mention the fact that thousands of copies of many things exist all over the world.