Inside the white cube: The ideology of the gallery space

by Brian O'Doherty

When these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translated--the three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. Having Brian O'Doherty's provocative essays available again is a signal event for the art world. This edition also includes "The Gallery as Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the others.
O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery was based. Concerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship between economics, social context, and aesthetics as represented in the contested space of the art gallery, he raises the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and system.
These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of postwar art in Europe and the United States. Teeming with ideas, relentless in their pursuit of contradiction and paradox, they exhibit both the understanding of the artist (Patrick Ireland) and the precision of the scholar.

91 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Brian O'Doherty is an Irish art critic, writer, artist, and academic. He was born at Ballaghaderreen in County Roscommon in 1928, and grew up in Dublin. He studied medicine at University College Dublin, and did post-graduate work at Cambridge University and at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has lived in New York for more than 50 years.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though his poetic and swinging language can sometimes make an obstruction for his argument, it's easy to see why this work has been so influential on the scene since 1970 and continues to be.