record modified event on related records

When you create a new Painting record and link it to an existing Artist 
record, that Artist receives update lifecycle events, even though no 
actual fields are changed in the database on that record.

I think this can often be unexpected and causes side effects you don't 
want (eg when trying to create audit logs).


1. Is this reasonable behaviour?

2. What do we think about a switch to turn this off or some additional 
properties when adding listeners to modify this behaviour?


Cheers

Ari