Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 – 2000

Notes

This an extract from the article https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/262138/colour-critique/ ; also adressing the book called " Spaces of Experience, Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000" from Charlotte Klonk.

Art vs 50's consumerism / Choregraphy of desire?

"In her influential book Spaces of Experience, Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000, Charlotte Klonk establishes a link between the consumerism of the 1950s and the rise of the white cube as spearheaded by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She concludes that the white cube was elected as the preferred exhibition interior because it was seen as the ideal environment to educate the tastes of its visitors. A skill—as it was argued by MoMA’s founding director—that could then be put to use in the budding consumer society of the time. Klonk thus points out that there is a nexus between art viewing and consumerism, one that has been actively supported by the white cube formula. If we bring this conclusion into the present, following Klonk, we might ask:

• how does the exhibition experience relate to the choreography of desire that is created in today’s attention economy?
• What role does the exhibition space and the way it is fashioned play in light of the current visual economy, as one that is increasingly characterised by online platforms and forms of consumerism in which images play an ever more important part?"

extract from ref

This fascinating study of art gallery interiors examines the changing ideals and practices of galleries in Europe and North America from the 18th to the late 20th century. It offers a detailed account of the different displays that have been created—the colors of the background walls, lighting, furnishings, the height and density of the art works on show—and it traces the different scientific, political and commercial influences that lay behind their development.
Charlotte Klonk shows that scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt advanced theories of perception that played a significant role in justifying new modes of exhibiting. Equally important for the changing modes of exhibition in art galleries was what Michael Baxandall has called “the period eye,” a way of seeing informed by the impact of new fashions in interior decoration and by department store and shop window displays. The history of museum interiors, she argues, should be appreciated as a revealing chapter in the broader history of experience."