When I was a little one, I try to remember becoming rushed out of the Museum of Modern-day Art in New York following attempting to touch an Ellsworth Kelly portray. I was puzzled when I heard alarmed voices as I approached the painting, hand outstretched. I could not connect the voices with myself, since what I was accomplishing seemed really sensible to me: I was captivated to a deep purple, so I wanted to contact it.

We do not dwell pretty easily with art. There are other forms of useful objects with which we coexist far more easily: sporting activities memorabilia, antique furnishings, musical devices, luxury watches and handbags. We tackle and wear and contact these matters, maybe due to the fact we have a perception of them as objects with some use or goal. But the standing of “art” normally elevates the object into anything with which we battle to live in a natural way.

Seeing this is like viewing a person else’s nightmare.

There are realistic good reasons for this. Art is typically intended to be encountered visually, on display screen, out of achieve of fingers. It can be fragile and call for security to past — especially when we’ve determined it need to be preserved as aspect of our cultural heritage. And nevertheless I watched the online video of the falling Picasso more than and in excess of, sensation not consternation but a rush of childlike joy. It was a vaguely transgressive working experience, to watch the regular guidelines — take care of with care, progress with caution — be so casually damaged. A boundary was crossed. This was the inverse of another transformation: when a neglected canvas in an attic is recognized as a Rembrandt or a van Gogh, using on unexpected importance and price. Here we get to observe the opposite. Very briefly, a portray by Pablo Picasso becomes a quotidian item, anything that falls on the floor and is picked up yet again. (The thief, also, transformed artwork into anything pedestrian through the heist, he reportedly instructed the police, he reduce his hand, applied the 16th-century sketch to wipe it and then discarded the piece in a toilet.)

I believed, right before seeing this video clip, that I was tired of artwork. I compose about it, among the other items, for a living, but soon after a year absent from museums, I did not come to feel the expected wish to return. It was only soon after seeing this video consistently that it transpired to me: What I was fatigued of was not art but the predictability of how we come across it. It is always at a distance, commonly at the rear of glass, generally in sterile galleries that resemble airports. Considerably of the world’s artwork is not encountered at all the economical benefit of artworks has led much more and far more collectors to order them as investments and store them, unseen, in climate-managed vaults.