This evolutionary cycle can be traced throughout several stages in Europe and in particular in New York, most notably in the 1960s, with former galleries around 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. 3 It virtually goes without saying that it did not magically appear out of proverbial thin air, but was morphologically preceded by a number of developments, the most significant of which is the apartment gallery, a spatial atavism that obviously exists, with a variety of motives and implications, to this day. Serious art and serious looking clearly existed long before the emergence of the white cube, so it would be wrong to think that the cube is intrinsic to art, and thus, an absolute spatial convention. a music venue, restaurant, or bar), the viewing experience and necessarily the seriousness of the art viewed therein is proportionally diluted. If this seems doubtful, consider a common, well-meant, yet often unsuccessful alternative: with a handful of exceptions, any time a given space shares a function or purpose (i.e. The singular purpose to which white cubes aspire is plain: the serious exhibition and contemplation of art. What is more, even though gallery conditions tend to foster a certain kind of self-contained art, in a quasi-sacral silence which is as auditory as it is architectural, this environment cannot be found anywhere else. For while a certain political correctness implicitly obliges us to condemn the ideological nexus of the white cube as a pseudo-religious perpetuator of mere commodity fetishization, 1 it cannot be denied that the vast majority of people who enter galleries do not do so to buy art. As a viewer, writer, and curator, I like the specific conditions it unequivocally establishes-be it in a museum or gallery space-which, with the exception of the opening (for socializing, networking), is to look at and experience art. At the risk of seeming conservative or reactionary, or somehow even gleefully politically incorrect, I’ll say that I actually like the white cube. But this, at least for me, is not necessarily the case. The first feature of Spaces proposes a taxonomy of four phyla to classify the apartment gallery.Īny reflection on an exhibition space alternative to the white cube would seem to imply some kind of critique of the latter.
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