The Failure of the White Cube From the 19th Century Moralist Art Museum to the 21st Century Civic Art Museum

Introduction  1 The private museum: Six types of collectors that paved the way for today’s public art museum, 685 BC–2020s  2 The moralist art museum: The Universal Survey Museum, 1793–1880s  3 The aesthetic art museum: The period room and other experimental displays, 1880s–1940s  4 The formalist art museum: The modern period room or the white cube and its six phases, 1900–2020s  5 The civic art museum: Participation and contextual
displays for the 21st century  6 Bad museology or how museums are killing artworks with bad placement and anachronism  7 An eight-step methodology for articulating exhibitions beyond the failed white cube

Biography

Paco Barragán is a curator, exhibition designer and cultural theorist. His curatorial work emerges from research-through-practice operating at the intersections of curating, theory, exhibition design and institutional analysis. He has curated 99 exhibitions in the Americas, Europe and Oceania and was previously Head of the Visual Arts at Cultural Arts Centre, Matucana 100, in Santiago de Chile. He is the author of From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-Liberal Biennial: On the ‘Biennialization’ of Art Fairs and the ‘Fairization’ of Biennials (2020) and The Art Fair Age (2009) and a co-editor of The Changing Meaning of Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance (2023) and When a Painting Moves... Something Must Be Rotten (2011).

Paco Barragán’s book is a breath of fresh air in museological literature. Drawing on examples from antiquity to the present, he offers a passionate and persuasive argument that the ‘white cube’ does not deserve the dominance it has enjoyed for decades. 

Andreas Blühm, Professor Art History and former Head of Exhibitions & Display Van Gogh Museum

 

Paco Barragán’s book dismantles many of the popular notions surrounding contemporary art’s most dominant exhibition model – the white cube – and the historical conditions that contributed to its creation and establishment. Well-researched, witty, provocative, informative, polemical, at times infuriating, Barragán’s writing is challenging but ultimately thought-provoking – the essential ingredient of every good book.

Michele Robecchi, Editor Phaidon Press

 

Paco Barragán dives polemically, but with great knowledge and depth into the problematics of exhibition spaces, offering for sure food for thought, not just for curators and art historians, but also for artists, dealers and exhibition designers. This book is like a civilized stranger that joins your table in the bar and leaves you perplexed.

Max Ryynänen, Lecturer Visual Culture Alvar Aalto University