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Do Not Touch: What happens when museum visitors ignore the signs

They're three words indelibly associated with museums and galleries: Do Not Touch. But not every four-year-old can read a sign.

In the nineteenth century, Little Lonsdale Street was rife with iniquity. So it's perhaps appropriate that Melbourne Museum's faithful recreation of the slum district saw light-fingered patrons making off with pots and kettles and other period props almost from the get-go. It must have taken a true Moriarty to pull off the exhibition's most bizarre crime, however.

Halfway into the installation sits a replica out-house – little more than a hole in a plank, really. But somehow amid the museum bustle, someone managed to drop trou, take a wee, and escape undetected. The toilet is protected by a sheet of plastic. The results weren't pretty.

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Earlier this year a 100,000 piece lego artwork was destroyed by a roaming child. Unfortunately, it's not the first time.

"Some poor customer service officer discovered it," says Maryanne McCubbin, the museum's head of strategic collection management. "On odd occasions the public can do really unpredictable things. We can't anticipate that!"

It's a very public problem: the problem of the public, that is. But galleries and museums the world over have to negotiate how to provide access to rare and important artefacts and at the same time protect these same objects from oily palms, dropped ice-creams and, apparently, bursting bladders.

In the past few months alone:

  • A British caterer has knocked the thumb off a priceless Roman statue, known as the Townley Venus.
  • A Brazilian tourist toppled a 300-year-old statue of the Archangel Michael in Portugal.
  • Earlier in the year another Portuguese icon, the Dom Sebastiao statue in Lisbon, was all but destroyed when a man clambered onto its pedestal to secure a better selfie.
  • ​And a 91-year-old woman faced criminal investigation after taking a blue biro to an artwork bon the wall of a Nuremberg museum in order to complete the crossword that featured in it.
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This statue, left, of young Dom Sebastiao, King of Portugal was totally destroyed, right, in May 2016 by someone trying to take a selfie.

This statue, left, of young Dom Sebastiao, King of Portugal was totally destroyed, right, in May 2016 by someone trying to take a selfie. Photo: Alamy

Melbourne Museum's permanent Wild exhibition includes in excess of 750 animals which have been collected over more than 150 years. It's been praised around the world for its use of open display, but that level of accessibility also raises the threat level. Some of its barely-there glass barriers were recently raised after public touching was deemed beyond acceptable.

"We found that some of the specimens were being damaged," says McCubbin. "Hair pulled, feathers plucked off. Probably just out of interest, because we all like to stroke animals."

McCubbin cites another case where a child climbed into a display. "We had a barrier of reasonable height but I think the parent had even enabled the child to climb over the barrier and into the display. So there can be really odd behaviours."

These incidents are outliers, of course, but the ease with which such accidents can be recorded and shared has grown dramatically. Last year surveillance footage from a Taiwanese arts centre went viral in the global museum community. It depicts a 12-year-old boy stumbling and using a 17th century painting to brace himself, in the process punching a hole in the canvas and spilling the contents of his soft drink can over it.

"We found that some of the specimens were being damaged," says McCubbin. "Hair pulled, feathers plucked off. Probably just out of interest, because we all like to stroke animals."

Melbourne Museum's Maryanne McCubbin

In 2014, another set of youngsters were snapped clambering all over a $10 million Donald Judd sculpture at London's Tate Modern. The photographer, Stephanie Theodore, confronted the  children's aunt and uncle before posting the image on social media, with the comment: "I told the woman the kids were using a $10mm [sic] art work as a toy, she told me I knew nothing abt kids."

Left: an artist performs live art alongside Untitled by Donald Judd, at the Tate Modern this year. Right: This photo of children climbing over a Donald Judd sculpture was posted on Twitter.

Left: an artist performs live art alongside 'Untitled' by Donald Judd, at the Tate Modern this year. Right: This photo of children climbing over a Donald Judd sculpture was posted on Twitter. Photo: Jack Taylor/Twitter: Stephanie Theodore @TheodoreArt

Then there was the 2012 incident in which a patron at the Art Gallery of NSW kissed the right butt cheek of a statue of Narcissus, leaving a large lipstick impression.

John Gibson's statue Narcissus at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

John Gibson's statue Narcissus at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, before and after the vandalism-by-lipstick incedent. Photo: James Brickwood

The same year saw a Denver art-goer drunkenly punch a Clyfford Still painting, "lean(ing) against the canvas with her pants down" and then urinating near, though not on, the $30 million work. She later blamed her behaviour on a drug cocktail. It is unclear if she has ever visited Melbourne Museum's Little Lon exhibit.

The question at the centre of all this might be a philosophical one: is the primary duty of a museum to preserve its collection or to make it accessible to the people?

"Our thinking here is it's not either-or," says McCubbin. "When you put things on display you actually accept a certain amount of loss in the condition of the material ... and you'll do all you can to minimise the loss."

Peter Denham, the new director, curatorial, of collections and exhibitions at Sydney's Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, agrees that things have to be openly displayed.

"In that way you're bringing the visitor much closer to the object and hopefully they're getting a much better understanding of what that object is and the stories that are being told around it. But it is a battle to have some clear delineation between touch and don't touch. It's a definite dilemma that we're all faced with," says Denham.

"There's a design challenge for all museums and galleries to show these things are OK to touch and these other things of course aren't."  One of the objects currently on display as part of MAAS's Icons exhibition is a Minton peacock, a tall and delicate ceramic piece from 1873. "It's incredibly beautiful and you do want to touch it because it's very colourful and has those beautiful glazes on it, but there were only seven ever made and there's one here. You want people to engage with that work, but if something happened to it we would all be very upset. So how do you engage with people?"

Icons from the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) collection, exhibition views. Level 3. Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney, At front is the Minton peacock.?Photo: Ryan Hernandez. ?Museum of Applies Arts and Sciences, Sydney.

Icons from the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) collection. At front is the Minton peacock. Photo: Ryan Hernandez

 The MAAS solution is the kind of subtle nudge that uses environmental cues to steer the public away from certain behaviours. In this case, the work is placed on a series of stepped plinths with a band of light around the edge. "They'd have to climb up on multiple plinths across a raised platform."

It's harder when an object on display appears less precious, as often happens in MAAS's Out of Hand show, which focuses on digital and 3D-printed objects.

"There's some classic Do Not Touch moments in that exhibition," says Denham. "One of the artworks is a typical white cup that you'd get at any drinking fountain and it's sitting atop this stack of paper that is all of the code that was sent to the 3D printer to print the cup. It's just this banal object and the amount of work that went into making it happen, but people just want to touch the paper and pick up the cup. We know they've touched the paper. The cup's still there."

McCubbin says that around seven or eight people will debate exactly how an object from Melbourne Museum's collection will go on display, but most of the choices they make will be invisible to the average visitor. You could touch some of the dinosaur bones if you dared – they're casts, after all. But the rarer or more precious an item is, the less accessible you'll probably find it.

"We do put a lot of thought into reaching capabilities and heights of barriers and that sort of thing," says McCubbin. "Height of barriers is very specific and thought through, in terms of protecting material. But you don't want to close it off."

If grabby kids are one well-meaning peril, the other pest facing stuffed animal collections comes in the form of the humble clothes moth. 

The careless public and the hungry pest are two of the so-called "10 agents of deterioration" that museum professionals refer to when assessing damage risks. Others include the obvious, such as fire and water, and the more scientific, such as chemical deterioration and the bleaching effects of light.

Then there's the overtly criminal – theft and vandalism are considered a single category, since both are malicious and deliberate acts. "We've certainly had exhibitions on display where we've had attempted thefts," says McCubbin.

One common target for would-be thieves is unexpected: "Actually, baskets. We had a temporary exhibition a while back and there were a couple of attempted thefts of baskets."

Historic firearms are also popular loot around the world, even though strict compliance regulations require that they be fully disabled. Another hot property for the larcenous is less of a surprise. Any museum's collection of gold and other precious metals will be under its tightest security, since they're easy to melt down and render untraceable.

Rare geodes and geological formations are also subject to safeguards that even McCubbin won't reveal in detail. "Some of these really valuable minerals and so on have very sophisticated security features. Cameras wired to the security room, alarms, that kind of thing."

The scale at which thefts from galleries and museums occur is all but unknown, however, since many institutions won't even share this information with each other. It's partly about reputational damage. "All museums are entrusted with caring for the collection," says McCubbin. "We develop the state collection and we're entrusted to look after it for the public, and when you have incidents like that it can be interpreted as a breach of your duty."

But the result of this secrecy is that there's little solid research into the extent of museum mishaps, and the trends that might be defined across different periods of time. McCubbin is one of the very few people in the world currently doing work in this area, scouring the online Trove archive of digitised newspapers to glean patterns in museum theft across a century of Australian history.

And like most museum professionals, McCubbin says that the risks associated with public display are ultimately outweighed by the benefits. "I really don't see the reason for having a collection if it's dead in storage, and so we do everything we can in all sorts of ways to make things accessible."

They certainly do: as McCubbin and I part ways, she points me in the direction of the bathroom. Can't be too careful.