"RESTORED" Wagner - how should we feel about this as collectors?

[bounce]

ML auction opened this week, there is some great stuff in there. Got my catalog in the mail yesterday. Was excited to see how the T206 Wagner did. Not a card I can afford, but always like watching the action on these.

The catalog had the regular write-up for a card of this caliber, which in my opinion has gotten so overdone. These cards don't need that level of description and hype, but that's a discussion for another day. What I didn't realize was just how extensive the "restoration" was on this card. The catalog doesn't show the back, but you can see it on the website. The back makes it much easier to see signs of just how much "grafting" of the borders was done. The description almost hypes the $14,000 spent fixing this thing up.

Sure - it looks nice I guess, but as a collector, this thing isn't REALLY a T206 any more.

I've been saying for years now that high end cards act much more like artwork when it comes to pricing, so maybe in some way this kind of thing was to be expected. However, at some level for me, this card has been so altered at this point, it's not really an "original" anymore. Using the artwork analogy, this seems more like a lithograph or a limited edition print than it does an original.

Or maybe think real estate - we can now just invest in some "remodeling" costs to make cards look better? I know there's other things like bleaching, etc. that have been done, not a fan of that either really but this was pretty extensive.

Just wondering how other people view this sort of restoration project.

EDIT: Added pictures of before and after, courtesy of t206resource.com