How the White Cube Came to Dominate the Art World

The reduction to a single, archetypal, repetitive image wasn’t an accident. It was the end point of a longer process.

Of course, that was the difference between a museum funded by an enduring estate and a gallery needing to actually sell shit, but still.

we are losing our capacity to “conceptualize a tomorrow that [is] radically different from our present.

Here we see a really pivotal moment of change, when art must become something that does not make people uncomfortable, so that they will spend money. The kind of person who is expected to consume art is transformed in the mind of the producer. The people who might very possibly love being expanded by what they see are never given the chance. They'

aside. In a typical gallery, ten or twenty gold-framed windows are blowing holes through the four walls.

I think that the word museum triggers a specific cultural behaviour – devout, silent. I believe that exhibiting in a white cube is by now an exhibiting in both senses of the German translation, ausstellen – on the one hand a ‘showing’, on the other a ‘switching off ’ of aesthetic reviving energies.