The Whitmore Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art announced Tuesday the grand opening of its new interactive gallery, ‘Please, We’re Begging You, Touch Something,’ following a three-year period in which attendance in every other wing hovered at roughly four people per week, most of them lost tourists searching for the bathroom.
The 2,000-square-foot exhibit features replicas of famous sculptures specifically reinforced to withstand fondling, climbing, and what curators are calling ‘aggressive selfie-related contact.’ A stress-tested fiberglass version of a 400-year-old marble figure now sits at the center of the room, having already survived what museum staff describe as ‘several small children attempting to ride it like a horse.’
‘We spent decades telling people to stay six feet back from priceless works of human genius, and it turns out that’s not what people want from a Saturday afternoon,’ said museum director Carla Fennimore. ‘What they want, apparently, is to press their entire palm against a Rodin. So now they can. It’s not a real Rodin. But they don’t need to know that.’
Early visitor reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, with several patrons noting it’s the first time they’ve spent more than ninety seconds in a single room without checking their phones. Meanwhile, the museum’s actual 16th-century collection remains almost entirely unvisited, save for a single retired art history professor who comes in weekly to weep quietly near the Vermeers. Museum leadership says a gift shop selling squeezable stress-ball replicas of the Venus de Milo is already in development.
