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

If Barr had drawn the history of the white cube instead of modern art, it might have looked like this.

An infographic titled “White Cube Chart (1900–2020s)” maps the history of white-cube exhibition spaces through a dense timeline of museums, galleries, movements and phases connected by overlapping colored bands.

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