The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is ‘art’. The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself. This gives the space a presence possessed by other space where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values. Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystic of the experimental laboratory joins with a chic design to give a unique chamber of aesthetics.
Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, London, 1986
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See Carol Duncan's book "Civilizing Rituals, inside public art museums" that is looking at the way in which museums offer up values and beliefs about social, sexual and political identity, in the form of vivid and direct experience. Duncan insists on the existence of museum rituals, because in her opinion "a museum's central meanings, its meanings as a museum, are structured through its ritual.
ReplyDeleteJackie Gray