As a professional restorer and conserver (not quite at the snooty level to be called a "conservator") of historic artifacts for thirty years, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff. Some things simply are not meant to be preserved; instead, they can be documented, and the resulting documents conserved. Take for instance the astonishing work of Andy Goldsworthy. https://www.google.com/search?q=andy+goldsworthy&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilssOKwMPUAhXINj4KHe1vD94Q_AUICigB&biw=1345&bih=910
In his case, the document is as much the artwork as the physical object it records.

A sculpture made of slices of bologna nailed to a wall is not meant to be preserved for decades or centuries. Probably not even months. Neither is a bust made of chocolate or soap. If museums want to preserve them for posterity, they should acquire the design drawings/molds, along with a license to periodically produce the end product. Otherwise, the best thing to do is simply document the ephemeral existence of the objects and describe their social and historic contexts to the best of your ability.

On a side note, I have restored several pieces which had chewing gum stuck in/on them that had essentially turned into the equivalent of two hundred year old glazing putty. It's very difficult to use old chewing gum for dating without chemical analysis, since after about thirty years of curing, it's hard to tell the difference between the early chicle based (a plant similar to the rubber tree, and the source for the name Chiclets) Civil War gums or from the Disco Era and the dawn of petroleum based chewing gum.

Do you work for a museum? Maybe I'm remembering this wrong, I though you had some kind of job involving digital rendering. Not that you can't do more than one thing for a living.

I've had an odd career path. In college while studying industrial design and classical visual arts, I got an internship in a historic artifact restoration shop. After designing industrial window manufacturing machines and radiation detection equipment for a while out of college, I felt the itch to work with my hands again and went back to the restoration world where I eventually started my own shop. A few years later I got into broadcast graphics and animation through my ID CAD skills and classical arts training with some friends in the film and video production world. Since then, I've bounced back and forth between hands-on restoration work and CG animation, usually teaching an undergrad class or two a semester. I've never really given up either restoration or animation, doing one as my main gig and the other on the side. Right now my full time job is as a technical director on a long term NASA contract, but I have an outbuilding with a nice workshop where I still take on restoration jobs for favorite clients I've accumulated over the years. It's a pretty sweet mix of 21st century tech and 16th century craftsmanship. I can't complain.

Just curious. I also have a background/education in fine arts, also make a living with both hands-on (art/museum related) and digital/graphics.
Don't much hear the term 'restoration' any more, that's pretty old-school, but then again I work with those snooty conservators.

I've spent some time working for a couple of museums, and it's definitely a different approach. I think the "restoration" vs. "conservation" thing might be the difference between private collectors who actually live with and often use the piece, and institutions whose primary goal is historic preservation. That's not to say private collectors aren't concerned with preservation, too, but where a museum faced with a badly worm-eaten and structurally unsound foot on a 1750 blockfront chest would probably fabricate a sturdy but discreet support while leaving the foot as a nicely french polished piece of shredded wheat, a private collector may prefer a hand-made replacement foot, made with period appropriate tools and materials that is indistinguishable from the sound original, correspondingly aged.

My goal is generally to preserve the original piece as much as possible including original finish, hardware, and any historic repairs, adding as little as possible, while making it aesthetically pleasing and structurally sound. Also, whenever possible, any work I do should be easily reversible by future generations. For instance with the rotten foot example, I removed the damaged foot and carefully wrapped it up, labeled, to be kept with the piece. If some future craftsman wants to put it back and exhibit the piece, they can.

I'm going on a bit too much. Sometimes I get a little defensive about it. :)

A sculpture made of slices of bologna nailed to a wall is not meant to be preserved for decades or centuries.

Hear, hear! It seems to me that any bologna artist who doesn't expect their bologna art to deteriorate over time and incorporate that decay into their bologna art is probably a pretty shitty bologna artist.

The decay of the bologna sculpture represents the impermanence of all things.

Well, you could resolve the problem by just not bothering.

If they can do it with Lenin, they can do it with bologna.

I'll preface this by saying ASSUMING video games are art, I'm more worried how those will be conserved. How does a work of art get to become public domain when no direct record of its existence might remain even decades before being able to become public domain?

There is a whole new field of conservation devoted to digital media. But when you talk about conserving video games, are you talking about the physical game cartridges, or the ones and zeros that actually make up the games?

I would say whatever is required to actually play the game.

Well, okay, but what is required to actually play the game? Where is the border of "the game experience"? Remember the discussion a while back about the decreasing availability of CRT displays?