Look. DON’T TOUCH (art)

You can look, but don’t tou— actually, go ahead and touch.

We’ve all felt it: standing in front of a sculpture that seems to be daring you to reach out, only for a small sign and a watchful guard to remind you that art is for looking, not touching. This week we’re celebrating the artists who reject that rule entirely — building work that only exists once a body moves through it. Here are three currently on view, each one proof that the most inspiring art isn’t always the art we admire from a distance, but the art that asks something of us.

Mike Hewson — The Key’s Under the Mat, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (until Aug 23, 2026) New Zealand artist Mike Hewson turns salvaged materials into what he calls “risky playgrounds.” Here, he’s transformed a 2,200-square-foot underground concrete tank into a full sculptural neighbourhood — sauna, BBQs, showers, a laundromat, a DJ booth — free to use and genuinely used, by children and adults alike, day and night. It’s a reminder that art can inspire simply by refusing to be precious about itself.

Ernesto Neto — SunForceOceanLife, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (until Sept 7, 2026) Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto has spent decades building immersive, crocheted environments meant to slow us down and reconnect us to our bodies. This piece is a hand-crocheted labyrinth suspended nearly four metres in the air, filled with shifting plastic balls underfoot — walkable, climbable, and designed as a meditation on the sun and sea. Neto’s inspiration lies in trust: he builds structures and simply lets us move through them.

Lina Lapelytė — We Make Years Out of Hours, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (until Jan 10, 2027) Best known for the seaside opera Sun & Sea (Marina), Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė has expanded her practice from performance into full public participation. Around 400,000 wooden cubes fill the historic hall, and visitors are invited to stack, dismantle and rebuild the landscape themselves — while live performers weave songs from twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry through the space four days a week. The result treats every visitor’s action as part of the finished work.

Large-scale interactive installations like these usually need an institution’s backing to exist — which is partly why major museums keep programming them. But the instinct behind all three doesn’t require vast space or budget: build something a body can change, and let people finish the work for you.

Expand the way you see art,