For vision, our most dominant sense, there is literature, painting, sculpture and film.
For hearing there is music.
For smell there is perfumery.
For taste there are the culinary arts.
Touch seems like the odd one out - it's playing second fiddle to taste in food, and to appearance in sculpture and clothing. You only very rarely find some artwork where the main draw is the tactile experience. Why is this?
For a blind person sculpture can surely be as engrossing as for a sighted person.
1: Notable exceptions exist; e.g., House of Leaves.
Fine art, like painting, is almost definitionally not supposed to be touched.
Applied arts include fibers (knitting, weaving), ceramics, jewelry and metalwork, etc. Stuff that’s meant to be pleasing and functional.
Whether something should be touched is almost _the thing_ that moves a field from one category to the other.
Applied artists, and their product designer cousins, will spend a lot of time exploring and pursuing tactile qualities.
Sculpture is underpreciated by you, have you tried to build at least a basic brick wall? This process involves almost no sight and a lot of touch.
Also, 4D theatres where they add motion, wind and water to enhance the experience.
Arguably, amusement park rides are all about messing with your sense of touch (proprioception, balance, etc)
Native American basketweaving https://www.sfomuseum.org/exhibitions/woven-legacies-basketr...
Renaissance sculpture https://www.collezionegalleriaborghese.it/en/collezione/scul...
Origami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami
Pottery https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/02/master-potter...
Textiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile
Dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance
Etc. Anything you make with your body, really, so also typing and literature :)
Two books I like about art:
The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture by Frank R. Wilson https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/191866/the-hand-by-...
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. This one speaks about how anything you do can be considered a form of art. A book with positive vibes. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717356/the-creative...
Smell has perfumery, but this is a small thing compared to other art forms. Both food and perfumes also fit well into the market system and have an obvious market incentive for their propagation.
Touch-based art forms don't scale electronically (as we lack devices for implementing and sharing different touch sensations) and they don't have an obvious practical art purpose either, in the way that graphic design (for visual art) or music (for sound) does.
As a side note, I think touch is probably just as important to food as taste. Otherwise, why not just eat flavored mush?
The key word you want to look for on this is haptic art. Here's a good post about this topic, too:
https://ivanisakov.medium.com/haptic-art-7f55e995c576
Edit: I was looking into this more and came across an essay by Johann Herder, which is probably of interest:
http://csmt.uchicago.edu/annotations/herder.htm
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25622078
Part One lays out the foundation for Herder’s argument for the virtues of sculpture by distinguishing between seeing and touching. He recounts several stories of blind people who did not understand the concept of seeing to point out the fact that we see sculpture as three dimensional only because we have grown up using our senses of touch and of sight in tandem. Were it not for touch, vision would merely be a field of colors and shapes. In this distinction we find a theme common to media theory, the problem of distinguishing the ways we interact with our surroundings, while at the same time recognizing their interdependence. While Herder realizes that our understanding of sight as forms depends on our sense of touch, he would have us define our understanding of forms only through touch and forget about sight. For him, since the essence of sculpture is "beautiful form and beautiful shape," and a "physically present, tangible truth," (p. 40) to understand it only as a vision is a profanation, a grave underestimation of its potential.
I'm glad people like what I make, but I do it not to say something, and rather to experience something.
One thought is that vision and hearing are all 1->many senses. That is, many people can stand around and experience one fireworks show, or one musician, or one painting. We've even invented ways of amplifying the "many" with speakers, projectors, etc. Perhaps this makes these art forms more commercially viable than touch, where a single person experiencing it excludes anyone else from the same experience? Maybe we need to invent a "touch multiplier" before the genre will take off?
To answer your rhetorical question, I don't think there's a form of art that is exclusively made to be appreciated with the tactile sense. But elements of many other arts have a tactile component: for example, cooking isn't just for taste, there's a major tactile component (and a major vision component, and a major smell component).
On a related note, drinking is not just about taste, but about the effect of a substance on your body, how it makes you feel, and so on. The same is true for other substances. What counts as art?
I think architecture has a tactile component: the feel of the materials used, or how a space can make you feel big, or small, or cozy, or cold, etc.
I also think athletics, if we can call athletics an art form, aren't only visual but have a sympathetic physical component—we feel a version of what the athlete we're watching is feeling.
Even music wouldn't be the same without a sense of touch. Feeling music with your body is important, not just hearing it (what's the difference again?). This is especially true for live music, which is to say all music up until pretty recently.
I'm not sure how much I buy all of the above. It's an interesting question though. I think my real answer is: why should we think there has to be? There's no rule that says that for every sense there must be a discrete form of art. It's just a coincidence that we can map different art forms onto different senses, but we can't even do that cleanly, as most of your examples appeal to more than one sense anyway.
1. Food is a touch-based art. Texture is such a critical and underrated component. Do you prefer the corner or center brownies?
2. Clothing is a touch-based art. Ask anybody on the spectrum.
3. Product design is a touch-based art. Feel how well your phone fits in your hand. Feel how well your ass fits your car seat or computer chair. Ever felt the finish of a nice pair of binoculars?
4. Craftsmanship is a touch-based art. Woodworking, metalworking, pottery. The end result can obviously be touch-based, but I'd argue the process is as well. Cutting, shaping, grinding, polishing, these are all intimately physical acts! Even CNC work has a physical connection.
5. Music is a touch-based art. Ask someone deaf.
Touching another person is widely considered an intimate act and most of the general mainstream today are only intimate (physically, or emotionally) with their romantic partner. Broadly speaking we've lost emotional intimacy with close friends and small groups that we've had in the past.
So with that, what is the incentive for the artist to create? He can't sell his work. He can't distribute his work. Touch-based art is highly dis-incentivized in our modern western culture.
Making this kind of categorization leads to a question to which the answer probably says more about the categorization, than about the individual items. I guess it is exactly due to these kinds of categorizations that there are institutions and/or art prizes that cover only a single sensor. Personally, I don't mind mixing culinary arts and music with contemporary art, but tastes differ.
Touching artworks can -typically does, albeit slowly- destroy them, thus touchable art is also a consumable.
All forms of art consumed through vision are not consumables -- they don't wear out from use. Well, some types of media, such as paper books and film do wear out from use, but not the actual contents.
Artists who want to make a durable impact on the world will -probably?- prefer to appeal to senses where the media can be non-consumable or slowly-consumable.
Massage
Keyboard/Piano
Tactile trinkets like Rubics Cube/Figet Spinners
Pottery/Sculpture
Construction
Climbing, Obstacle Courses
Cleaning/Washing
Cooking
unfortunately, unlike a drawing, it is hard to share awesome pots in the way they are meant to be appreciated, you do need to pick them up and see how they sound and feel... this wouldn't work out well in a museum
If you’re exclusively looking for things where you can put your hands on stuff then maybe a petting zoo?
To have art deliver such signals, I guess you'd have to like being a marionette... ;-)
I mean there are a bunch of gadgets that are somewhat interesting to touch, but the real stuff would require someone to do something to you (the robotics isn’t there yet to create an experience that is both interesting and reproducible).
A bunch of contemporary artists actually focus primarily on the sense of touch. A French artist for example named Myriam Lefkovitz does pieces in the dark.