The Power of Touch in High Art

Don’t Touch the Art by DS Waldman

The first time I brought my mother to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she reached out and touched one of my favorite paintings. I’d acquired a long-term press pass to the museum to help finish my first book, which features a number of ekphrastic poems and art criticism, so for two years I came and went for free. Having spent considerable time there, I was excited to show my mother, an old-process photographer, some of my favorite things, especially in the cameraless photography wing. 

Together, and separately, we drifted around the gallery, along walls of Man Ray’s ghostly rayographs, Allison Rossiter’s experimental photograms printed on expired, thus unstable, photo paper. At the gallery’s exit—or entrance, depending on one’s path—there hung a wall-size grid of cyanotypic squares, all together forming a single, very large blue rectangle. Across the blue grid, sprays and roils of white, like sea foam, as though an actual wave had broken across the wall, had broken but frozen mid-break. I could almost taste the marine brine, feel the coastal chill.  The piece was titled Littoral Drift Nearshore #209, the artist Meghan Riepenhoff. And I’d learned from the wall placard that Riepenhoff did, in fact, incorporate seawater into the work, throwing buckets of water and silt from Washington’s Fletcher Bay across the cyan-exposed paper. I remember looking across the gallery and watching my mother see Littoral Drift for the first time, thrilling a little to share the experience of it with her, eager to hear what she thought.  She stood, first, at a distance, taking in the whole of the composition, then she walked slowly toward it. I expected her to stop at some middle distance, or maybe at a very near point, inspecting the granular detail of the thing. But she didn’t stop. I watched my mother walk right up to the piece and lift a corner of one of the blue squares off the wall, inspecting the backside of the paper.

I don’t know how the attendant hadn’t stopped her—they stood only a few yards away. When they came to and saw my mother with the art in her hand, they shouted very loudly, told her to back away, then approached and told her that if it happened again, they’d have to ask her to leave. My mother and I left the gallery and regrouped in the atrium.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she said, genuine surprise on her face, “I don’t know what got into me.” 

She said she’d felt like a child, had felt and given in to that infant impulse to reach out and touch. My mother loves the ocean, and living in landlocked Kentucky, she doesn’t get to see it—or touch it—very often.

We’ve gone together to many art museums, domestic and abroad; I’ve never seen her do anything like that, touching the art. And I found myself, for the rest of our afternoon at SFMOMA, privately upset with the attendant who had so publicly scolded my mother, embarrassed her, sent her—for the rest of the afternoon—a little farther into herself, and away from the art. My mother stayed well behind the tape lines on the floor, kept her hands behind her back. 

Of course, I don’t blame the attendant for doing their job, and I also don’t believe anyone at any time, in a museum, should be allowed to put their hands on a piece of art. We protect and preserve these things so we and future generations can continue experiencing them, so they remain actual, so Littoral Drift Nearshore #209, in 10 years, 50, won’t become a ghost we know only from photographs. But the experience did open in me a fundamental conundrum around how we, collectively, are allowed to experience art.  

There’s the familiar criticism of high art, that because of the often exorbitant cost of museum tickets, and the general concentration of the “best” museums in expensive cities like San Francisco and New York and Paris and London, high art is in effect only available to those that can afford the experience—an increasingly smaller and smaller demographic. And even then, with the ticket purchased, the traditional museum experience is almost uncomfortably formal, sterile, the space between the viewer and object charged with the tension of surveillance, the boundaries demarked with tape and ropes and sometimes plates of glass, the eyes of guards and ceiling cameras watching you look at the mural or sculpture, watching you watch the video installation. A former teacher of mine, a poet and art lover, told me she disliked art museums because they made her feel constipated.

I don’t especially mind the traditional museum experience, or maybe I’ve just grown accustomed to it. I can’t easily imagine an alternative, a way of being around high art that feels less stiff while also protecting and preserving the art objects. It seems something would have to give. 

I’m reminded of a scene in Garth Greenwell’s novel Cleanness in which the narrator, an American living and teaching in Bulgaria, goes out drinking one night with a group of former students. They gather with their bottles of vodka and cartons of orange juice in a sort of public park or square adorned with a number of marble pillars and cornices, all from antiquity, all in some stage of decay or brokenness. The narrator has a visceral reaction when his former student sets the orange juice carton on top of one of these ancient pillars, using it as a table. But the student pushes back, “ . . . you’re still such an American,” he teases, “we have stuff like this everywhere.” The ancient art existed simply as part of the cityscape; it was there for anyone to touch or sit on or use as a table for their booze. There’s something undeniably democratic about it, the art or artifact made as common and available as a public water fountain or a bench in a park. It makes me want to read that word “American,” in the scene, as “capitalist.”  Whereas the pillar beneath the orange juice has more or less been freed from capital—returned to the people—so much high art, like Littoral Drift, and high archaeology, as we might see in the Egyptian Art Wing of the Met, exists behind the glass plate of money, markets, and valuation. 

My senior year in college, our Art History thesis cohort took a trip to New York, where our instructor, through some friend of a friend, managed to coordinate a private tour of the Met’s painting conservation department. We arrived early to the museum, before it opened, and were escorted through a back entrance to the conservation studios, which I’d expected to look like a sterile, windowless laboratory, all the conservationists in hazmat suits. But the space was gorgeous, warm, with floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, wood tables and stools and easels, the space in reality more like an actual artists’ studio, as though the Rembrandts and O’Keefes had been created there, not just restored. Our guide, Sarah, brought us into the studio and showed us a painting she’d just begun working on, a Renaissance fresco that had been removed from its frame and set across several easels. She walked us through her process, how she removed discolored varnish and old overpaints, how she retouched areas where paint had flaked away, how she “ingilded” abrasions. These people are artists, I thought, listening to Sarah, who wore a smock and magnifying lens and told us about the rates of degradation for different paints. She looked with what seemed authentic wonder at the fresco, a wonder similar, maybe, to mine and my cohort-mates’.  But behind the wonder, or next to it, the specter of capital colored almost everything Sarah said. The fresco was in excellent condition, she told us, for a piece its age, “but even a blemish like this”—we followed her gloved finger to an almost indecipherable irregularity in the paint, the coloration—“even this, if not tended to, or tended to poorly, could drastically impact valuation.” Tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars, she said. She shared the story of an incident she witnessed, a 19th century American portrait dropped, the original frame breaking. “I don’t know what that did to its value,” she said, “but it was a horror story.”

I remember standing there, my awe struck through with disillusionment. 

My mind wandered to a new installation on our college campus. Outside the little Art and Art History building, the school had recently commissioned and installed a large piece by the artist Patrick Dougherty, known for his low-tech, ephemeral outdoor sculptures and semi architectural installations. The piece was made entirely of sticks, sticks woven together into one- or two-stories-high steeples, or tall pointy huts, hollow with a tunnel path through them, so people could pass through, feel surrounded by the work, exist inside of it, and actually reach out and touch the woven-stick-walls. It’s a special experience, being allowed to exercise that childlike instinct to reach out and touch, and also to be allowed, encouraged even, to run one’s hands over the same materials graced, once, by the artist’s hands, for there to exist a physical relationship, across time, between artist and viewer. 

Anyone at any point could have destroyed the Dougherty piece, driven into it with a car or taken a chainsaw to the weave of sticks. But they didn’t. That, too, added beauty to the composition, or my experience of it, that unspoken communal understanding that we will not harm this piece of art, that we will leave the process of decay and gradual degradation to time, just like those marble pillars holding the carton of orange juice in the Bulgarian public park in Cleanness. Collectively, we’d decided to conserve the art—and over time, to let it go. 

I spoke with my professor, after, about my experience in the conservation studio, my dilemmas around preservation and decay and capital, touch and its prohibition, and how it all seemed to swirl between the viewer and the art. He reminded me, over coffee and pastries on the Upper East Side, of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark. I had learned of Matta-Clark in a Postmodernism course, taught by that same professor. He worked in the late 60s, through his death in 1978, and was known for a school or style or philosophy of artmaking he referred to as “Anarchitecture.” Its politics were knit into its name: an art, an architecture, free from governmental systems, free from capital and the high art market. Matta-Clark, who produced some 50 works before he died at age 35, identified buildings and public structures slated for demolition, and on their way to ruin, Matta-Clark made almost sculptural modifications to the buildings. He sawed-in-half a house in New Jersey in 1974, laying bare a sort of cross-section, as one might have seen as a child in those Eyewitness picture books. He dug a wide hole through the floor of an art gallery, and built into its walls—into the Earth of it—a spiral staircase one could actually descend, taking them several yards down below floor-level. In 1975, he made a series of very large cuts through the floor and walls of the wharf building on Pier 52 in Manhattan. Through the cuts in the floor, one could see, or touch, the Hudson River; and through his cuts in the walls, peculiar slants of light fell across the dock, the water, shafts of light one could see, at the right time of day, and walk through. Matta-Clark’s work, generally, was made open to the public when finished. There were no fees or tickets, no rules for how or how not to engage. In fact, his work at Pier 52 was done with no prior permission or permit, so viewers had to sneak through a chain-link fence to experience it. The city issued a warrant for Matta-Clark’s arrest and he was forced to briefly flee the country. None of his projects exist anymore—they were all destroyed or demolished, or in the case of the hole in the gallery floor, filled back in. We know his work only from photographs and accounts of those who saw it.  

No doubt this would have pleased the artist, his art’s ephemerality maintained. But it’s worth noting that many of the photographs taken of his work were later sold for sums I can’t even locate online without paying over $1,000 for the annual “Appraiser” subscription to the database that contains Matta-Clark’s auction data. 

I can envision a past in which the city of New York, having observed the underground interest in Pier 52, decided not to demolish the structure but rather reinforce it, polish it up, and eventually charge $30 per ticket to walk around. Likewise, I can imagine a world in which the Dougherty installation was treated with some sort of preservative chemical and transported to MoMA, left on display for decades. And these pieces might well have maintained some of their impact, their effect on a viewer. But it would all have come at the cost of their ephemerality, their certain and not too distant ruin. Ephemerality would be exchanged for a certain climate-controlled preciousness—Do not touch—as well as market value. Someone would benefit, financially, from their preservation, but it likely would not be the artist benefiting the most, and certainly not the viewer. 

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.  

In recent years, in museums across the world, we’ve seen more bold and immediately damaging versions of such organized protest: In early 2025, protesters from the climate activist group Last Generation Canada threw bright pink paint across Picasso’s L’hetaire;  the UK-based coalition Just Stop Oil has been responsible for similar attacks on works by van Gogh and Degas; in August 2024, members of Last Generation Austria poured black oil across Klimt’s Death and Life, and one person glued their hand to the frame—the painting itself, though, was not damaged, as it was encased in glass. I do bristle at these more destructive forms of protests; I’m not interested in purposefully damaging or destroying someone else’s art. But within the idea that canonical high art—Picasso, van Gogh, Degas, Klimt—is a worthwhile target for climate activists, that the art possesses such cultural capital and capital-capital, is this idea that touch, as it pertains to high art, is potent in both what it adds, potentially, to a viewer’s experience of an artwork—see 22-year-old me in rural Vermont, running my hands along the inner walls of the Dougherty installation that was called, I just remembered, So Inclined—and also how touch threatens the capital structures that possess, even fortress, these canonical works. 

Another figure who comes to mind in relation to art and touch is Alexander Calder. Before my time at SFMOMA, I’d never seen in-person one of Calder’s mobiles, only photos on PowerPoint slides in dark lecture halls. Calder was a tinkerer, and worked across a wide range of media, but he’s best known for these bright, playful mobiles that, to me, look best-suited to dangle above a child’s crib, absently slow-whirling while the child reaches and reaches. SFMOMA had—and still has, as of my writing this—on display a Calder exhibition called “Dissonant Harmony,” which includes a number of his works across media, including little model villages outfitted with motorized trains. But the mobiles are the centerpiece of the exhibition. They hang in their own dedicated gallery, surrounded by windows, the dramatic San Francisco light slanting through downtown high rises, reflecting, creating a certain sparkle in the gallery. Several smaller mobiles, like modest chandeliers, hang around the room’s periphery, while three larger mobiles occupy more prominent positions within the room’s interior; one can walk completely around each of them, 360 degrees. And each is a little different from the others, some composed of black wire, some white, some accented with yellow metal spades, some red, the general shape and composition just a little different in each mobile. 

I recall, written on the wall in big white font against a red background, a quotation from the artist: “Disparity in form, color, size, weight, motion, is what makes a composition.” I liked the quotation, in part, because I could actually see it in the artwork. I could see disparity in the myriad lengths and bends of wire, the different sizes and colors of the spades counterbalancing each other from their respective ends of the mobile. And I could see, or could sense, the underlying desire for motion; these things want to move, to be hung outdoors, maybe, exposed to wind. Calder had gifted one of his large mobiles to the artist Piet Mondrián in exchange for a workspace on Mondrián’s property in Southern France. Mondrián hung it outdoors, where it caught coastal breeze off the Gulf of Lion. 

Toward the end of my time there, SFMOMA organized an event called “Calder in Motion.” People could buy tickets to see, as the title suggested, the mobiles put into motion by specially trained museum staff. I was curious and eager, somehow satisfied that the museum was addressing what I perceived as the elephant in the room, the haunting stasis of these iconic Calder works, the artificial stillness. My press pass got me in for free, so I went both days. I remember standing in the familiar gallery, crowded for the event, almost claustrophobic, and watching the person from the museum gently, precisely set the mobiles into a slow whirl. He used what he called his “Calder push stick,” which looked more or less like an oversized Q-tip. He lined up the head of the Q-tip with the end of the wire, where the dangling spades attached, and carefully pressed—something about his way of doing this reminded me of pushing a canoe or kayak out into a lake, or the sea. A long, slow motion, tender. There might’ve been music streaming overhead. Children watched from the shoulders of their parents.

It was a nice time, if a little awkward. Something about the size of the crowd, the formality of the event, the pricey tickets, stoked my longstanding reservations about high art, access, capital. It all felt misaligned with the very quotidian, wind-chime movement of the mobiles, which in fact I had witnessed once before in that room. 

A year and a half earlier, on a Tuesday morning just after the cyanotype-touching incident with my mother, I arrived at SFMOMA just as they opened. For those first 30 or so minutes, while other patrons checked their bags and coats and bought tickets, I could be alone in this or that gallery. I stood with one of my favorite paintings there, an early Braque, and I spent time with the large Rivera mural they had on display. And I ended up in the Calder gallery, alone for a good while, slow walking around the mobiles, standing close, standing far, taking them all in at once. After maybe 10 minutes like this, I heard a small commotion from the corridor, and turned to see a young kid—five years old? six?—who must’ve wriggled free from his mother. I could see it all happening before it happened, before I actually saw the boy enter the gallery. Or maybe I just wanted to see it, was willing it to happen, rooting for him, egging him on in my head. He came charging into the room, his rainboots clicking against the hard floor, his mother several steps behind, her arms full with their jackets and a disposable camera. She said her son’s name: Julian. She said it again, louder, hurrying to close the distance between them. She reached him just as he reached the mobile, his arm drawn back, winding up, his hand splayed open. It all came together for me then, the mobile in the trees between Mondrián’s home and the sea, the irregular twirl and bounce of it, the trees around it, too, branches bobbing in the wind. My own hand, 10 years earlier, along the rugged weave of the Dougherty outside the art building. The Hudson in late light, in wrinkled motion through the sawed-through slats of Pier 52.  Julian drew back his arm even further. Maybe it’s just how I’ve chosen to remember it, but I think his mother was right there, close enough to reach for his small arm and keep it all from happening. Where was the guard? Julian’s mother let him slap the little red spade hanging low to the ground, and the wind caught the mobile and sent it, however briefly, into motion, slow-whirling in the late morning San Francisco light. Then she took her son’s hand and led him out of the room.