"Do Not Touch"
DS Waldman, Electric Lit:
I wonder, is it safe to generalize that touch, or exposure to touch, necessarily devalues a piece of art? Does the very idea that a painting or sculpture has come into direct contact with the public, the viewer’s flesh, make the painting or sculpture worth less money? If this is true, then how powerful a thing touch is. I imagine a scenario in which, across the world, in all the biggest, fanciest museums—all the MoMAs, The Met, The Louvre, the Guggenheims—a group of people coordinated to, all at once, cross the tape lines on the floor and run their hands across all the high-value paintings, the Rembrandts and Basquiats and Dalís and Monet’s Water Lilies. I imagine the paintings’ values all at once plummeting, the paintings themselves largely unaltered, save for the oils from the human hands that touched them. I imagine global art markets collapsing under the weight, the idea, of touch.
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Link:
- The Power of Touch in High Art, by DS Waldman, Electric Lit