When is a white cube not a white cube? Answer: when it's a metaphor. In 1976, Brian O'Doherty wrote a series of three essays and a subsequent book titled Inside the White Cube. The work focuses on the white cube of the gallery space - its blank white walls -and addresses how it elevates any object within it. "The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is 'art'," writes O'Doherty. "The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself." Thus, once that work or object is segregated from its surroundings, it takes on importance. This idea was...
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