study task 2 - book: Inside the White Cube

I decided to get some books out of the library that I thought would be relevant to my quote and read some of them during our COP week starting with 'inside the white cube'

I've read this book to find more information and understanding about the idea that the rich and powerful control art in the sense they control galleries and it gave me some amazing ideas and insights into the gallery space.

'a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of twentieth century art; it clarifies itself through a process of historical inevitability usually attached to the art it contains.'

' This gives the space a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values. Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics. So powerful are the perceptual fields of force within this chamber that, once outside it, art can lapse into secular status. Conversely, things become art'

'the gallery itself becomes, like the picture plane, a transforming force. At this I point, as Minimalism demonstrated, art can be literalized and 1 detransformed; the gallery will make it art anyway.'

'At its most serious, the artist/audience relation can be seen as the testing of the social order by radical propositions and as the successful absorption of these propositions by the support system -galleries, museums, collectors, even magazines and house critics -evolved to barter success for ideological anesthesia. The main medium of this absorption is style, a stabilizing social construct if ever there was one. Style in art, whatever its miraculous, self-defining nature, is the equivalent of etiquette in society. It is a consistent grace that establishes a sense of place and is thus essential to the social order.'

' Each art licensed a premises where it conformed to and sometimes tested the social structure- concert hall, theater gallery.... Such places are, then, metaphors for consciousness and revolution.'

'For many of us, the gallery space still gives off negative vibrations when we · wander in. Esthetics are turned into a kind of social elitism -the gallery space is exclusive. Isolated in plots of space, what is on display looks a bit like valuable scarce goods, jewellery, or silver: esthetics are turned into commerce - the gallery space is expensive. What it contains is, without initiation, well-nigh incomprehensible-art is difficult. Exclusive audience, rare objects difficult to comprehend -here we have a soda!. financial. and intellectual snobbery wh1ch models our system of limited production, our modes of assigning value, our social habits at large. Never was a space, designed to accommodate the prejudices and enhance the self-image of the upper middle classes, so efficiently codified.'

'Was the white cube nurtured by an internal logic similar to that of its art? Was its obsession with enclosure an organic response, encysting art that would not otherwise survive? Was it an economic construct formed by capitalist models of scarcity and demand?'

'Is the artist who accepts the gallery space conforming with the social order? '

'Museums and galleries are in the paradoxical position of editing the products that extend consciousness, and so contribute, in a liberal way, to the necessary anesthesia of the masses- which goes under the guise of entertainment'


interesting side point: Tate galleries were built on slavery (Tate and Lyle sugar plantations)