After the White Cube.

Notes

How and why White Cube rised and became democratized

"The initial setting for modern painting and sculpture, produced as it typically was for the market, was the 19th-century interior, usually the bourgeois apartment, and early museums for this art were often made up of refurbished rooms of a similar sort. This model was gradually displaced by another: as modern art became more abstract and more autonomous, it called out for a space that mirrored its homeless condition, a space that came to be known as ‘the white cube’. In turn this model came under pressure as the size of ambitious work expanded after World War Two – from the vast canvases of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and others to the serial objects of Minimalists like Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, and on to the site-specific and ‘post-medium’ installations of subsequent artists from James Turrell to Olafur Eliasson. To hold together the large halls needed for contemporary production with the delimited galleries for modernist painting and sculpture is no easy task, as any visit to Tate Modern or MoMA attests. And the problem is complicated by the fact that some new art demands yet another kind of space, an enclosed area darkened for the projection of images that has come to be called ‘the black box’." ref

White Cube // Consumerism = Art Consumerism?

"Two factors were central to the expansion of modern and contemporary art museums. In the 1960s, as industry began to collapse in New York and other cities, manufacturing lofts were turned into inexpensive studios by artists such as the Minimalists, in part so that they could produce work that might test the limits of the white cube. Eventually, though, old industrial structures, such as power stations, were refashioned as new galleries and museums in order to cope with the increased size of this art."

Exhibition Space > Artworks

"Some museums become so sculptural that the art arrives after the fact, and can only ever be second on the bill; this is often the case at the Maxxi (Museum of the 21st-Century Arts) in Rome, a neo-Futurist plaiting of low-slung volumes designed by Zaha Hadid. Such museums make such a strong claim on our visual interest that they stand as the dominant work on display, and upstage the art they are meant to present; though it is too early to say, this might also be the impression left by Tate Modern II. Other museums become so theatrical that the artists feel they have to respond to the architecture in the first instance; this is sometimes the case at the Institute of Contemporary Art, created by Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the Boston harbour front, so ingenious is it as a machine for seeing and spectating. "

Experience of interpretation = Entertainment of Art?

"What relation do modern and contemporary art museums have to a culture that so prizes the entertainment experience? As early as 1996, Nicholas Serota framed ‘the dilemma of museums of modern art’ as a stark option, ‘experience or interpretation’, which might be rephrased as entertainment on the one side and aesthetic contemplation and/or historical understanding on the other. "

Museum vs Mausoleum

"‘Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association,’ Adorno wrote in 1953 in ‘Valéry Proust Museum’. ‘Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art. They testify to the neutralisation of culture.’ Adorno ascribes this view to Valéry: it is the view of the artist in the studio, who can only regard the museum as a place of ‘reification’ and ‘chaos’."

Conclusion

"The upshot is this: viewers are not so passive that they have to be activated, and artworks are not so dead that they have to be animated, and, if designed and programmed intelligently, museums can allow for both entertainment and contemplation, and promote some understanding along the way."