The “white cube” model is the museal translation of Clement Greenberg’s ideas on modernism and/as medium-specificity. It refers to a visually neutral space completely enclosed in itself, where the world outside is kept at a safe distance, if not totally ignored, and everything can be seen and read at the mere surface of the objects on display. In such a space, visitors do not interact with anything other than the works, all exemplifying what a medium is expected to eventually disclose, namely the basic properties of its medium.
The white cube is thus a machine that radically decontextualizes, dehistoricizes, and depoliticizes art, both in the making and the experiencing of art. It has been fiercely criticized for all these reasons for many decades, actually since the start of the so-called “institutional critique” that emerged from Minimalism, but the analysis of its own history and meaning still presents a lot of...