The Crisis of the Museum Is the Crisis of the White Cube

Political art trapped in the formalist and ‘unpolitical’ white cube: installation view Palimpsest (2013-2017) by Doris Salcedo, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2022.

An expansive white gallery shows visitors walking across a pale floor with faint text, beneath a large gridded ceiling that diffuses the light.

What’s the use of decolonizing the canon, decolonizing the collection and decolonizing the program if we don’t decolonize the white cube itself—the container that still structures how art is seen, experienced, classified and legitimized?

The Crisis of the Museum Is the Crisis of the White Cube