"Touching Harms the Art." That's how they word it now. The precise wording varies. "Touching Can Harm the Art," a label will remind, like hey, it's your decision, but FYI. Other times there's yelling. "OUCH EVEN THE LIGHTEST TOUCH HARMS THE ART," said the baby-blue sign put up to guard Richard Serra's steel Wave installation at the open outdoor Olympic Sculpture Park in downtown Seattle. You'd think Serra's steel monuments would be immune to a few fingerpads, but it's the art's surface, its skin, that can't take it, that actually changes when it's touched. It rusts into other colors, from the oils.

As a rule, the human-art interface today is governed by a condition of patrolled distance. You look at art, you don't touch it, and yet the bar for great art is that it touches you. As the artist Ann Hamilton writes, "To touch is always to be touched in return." You can see but not be seen, hear but not be heard, taste but not be tasted, smell but not be smelled. Touch anything, and it touches you, becomes part of you, imprints and changes you.

Hamilton's large new exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery at UW is about the desire to touch and be touched. It's about intimacy and not-intimacy. I touch a sea cucumber because what else can I do with a sea cucumber? I touch my dog and we both like it for reasons neither of us understands. I touch my dead grandmother's handkerchief because I can't touch her.

This is not a review. When Hamilton led me through the exhibition last week, it was unfinished, so I can't tell you what it's like to experience it until it opens this weekend. I'll write about it for next week's paper.

The show is titled the common SENSE, as in, Hamilton explains, touch is "a sense common to all animal species." A few things to know now:

1. Hamilton has taken over the entire museum. She's unblocked all the skylights and windows, and it feels like a different place, older and more fragile, less fortified, prettier.

2. The objects are a mix inspired by and borrowed from the dead animal specimens and animal-based costumes in the collection of the Burke Museum and the files of the UW Libraries Special Collections. To take pictures of the dead animals, Hamilton physically placed them on old, low-resolution scanners. The parts of the animals that touched the scanner's surface appear in focus; anything not touching goes soft. The photographs are printed on newsprint and hung in stacks on the walls. You're allowed to tear one off and take it with you, but when the piles of photographs are depleted, there aren't any more; they are extinct.

3. You can contribute to the exhibition by posting to a Tumblr site pieces of writing or images pertaining to touch. Here. Show opens Saturday.

While we're thinking about animals and art museums and what's touching even if you don't know why, watch Nightwatch, Francis Alÿs's surveillance video of a fox released one night into the National Portrait Gallery in London.