Thomas McEvilley’s introduction to Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube: the Ideology of the Gallery Space summarises the book as follows:

Modern art gallery spaces are built to a rigid set of rules; walls are white and there are no windows, thus the art is free to ‘take on its own life.’ The context is similar to that of religious buildings; the artworks appear out of time so take on their own status of appearing in limbo in a ‘chamber of eternal display.’ Egyptian tomb chambers which also built as a removal from the outside world, and from the flow of time, as were Paleolithic cave art chambers, which were deliberately set in areas which were difficult to access. These spaces are ritualistic and attempt to ‘cast an appearance of eternity over the status quo in terms of social values and also, in our modern instance, artistic values.’

O’Doherty states that, on entering the white cube, we give up our humanness – like in a religious building we do not speak, eat, drink, lie down, since or dance. The white cube attempted to bleach out the past and become a transcendental space, but the problem with transcendental principles is that they refer to another world.

Plato theorised that ‘at the beginning was a blank where there appeared inexplicably a spot which stretched into a line, which flowed into a plane, which folded into a solid, which cast a shadow, which is what we see’. The white cube represents the blank which Plato claimed everything evolved from.

It is interesting that the white cube is compared to a religious building as I have certainly felt a reverence when looking at iconic artworks similar to that within a cathedral and agree with the sensation of feeling out of time. However, the modern gallery is also often too overcrowded (pre-COVID) to gain that sense so that actually achieving it is rare. The aim of achieving commercial success by getting as many visitors in as possible does not easily align with the design sensibilities of the white cube and thus the effect is often lost.