This provocative book bridges the gap between theoretical academic writings and practical museum curating, tracing the journey from 19th-century moralist art museums to today's 21- st century inclusive civic art museums via a sustained critique of the 20th-century formalist and hetero-normative white cube model of curating in art museums.
The book offers a comparative analysis of the 19th-century moralist art museum, the 20th-century formalist art museum, and the 21st-century civic art museum. It critiques the white cube model, highlighting its failure to address contemporary issues of gender, identity, race, and inclusivity. The author provides a clear genealogy of the white cube, detailing its six phases and charting its development and global expansion from the 1900s in Austria and Germany to the 2020s. Additionally, the book examines successful non-white cube museologies and exhibition designs before proposing a practical 8-step methodology for curatorial and exhibition design aimed at overcoming the limitations of the traditional white cube. The analysis draws on numerous detailed case studies and integrates insights from museum studies, art history, art market, collecting, institutional art systems, curatorial studies, cultural studies and practical curatorial experience.
This thought-provoking research will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of museum studies, art history, architecture and exhibition design, and especially curatorial practice.
Table of Contents:
00. Introduction: The persisting ‘formalist unconscious’ and the white cube 01. The private museum: 6 types of collectors that paved the way for today’s public art museum, 685 BC-2020s 02. The moralist art museum: the Universal Survey Museum, 1793-1880s 03. The aesthetic art museum: the period room and other experimental displays, 1880s-1940s 04. The formalist art museum: the modern period room or, the white cube and its 6 phases, 1900- 2020s 05. The civic art museum: participation and contextual displays for the 21st century 06. Bad museology or, how museums are killing art works with bad placement and anachronism 07. An 8-step methodology for articulating exhibitions beyond the failed white cube 08. Epilogue: The Power of Display.
About the Author :
Dr. 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).
