Something about the attitude that conscious art-touchers may espouse reminds me of Jonathan Haidt’s writing about bias (see “The Happiness Hypothesis,” 2006). Psychological researchers have found that subjects will readily identify other people’s biases but not their own. In other words, we all feel that we see things objectively, as they are, while everyone else is biased.

Perhaps art-touchers enact this bias when they assume “It’s OK, because it’s just this one time” or “Since I’ll be careful, I won’t damage the art, so the rule doesn’t apply to me.”

But as an artist and a preparator who spends very long days and nights making artworks and galleries look as perfect as possible, and further, expends additional time, labor and resources on things like framing and crates to preserve this highly artificial state of perfection, the rather arbitrary and casual way that art-touchers will so readily un-do this state, whether intentional or not, can feel polarizing. Sometimes, it is as if audiences anthropomorphize and accelerate the forces of entropy.

The urge has come over me subconsciously when looking at Robert Rauchenberg’s assemblages. I think this is because of the familiar everyday objects incorporated into the work. Objects that actually hang or are placed on the canvas nearly beg to be touched. They’re actually very similar to the Jasper Johns assemblage above.