When these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translated—the three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. Having Brian O'Doherty's provocative essays available again is a signal event for the art world. This edition also includes "The Gallery as Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the others.
O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery was based. Concerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship between economics, social context, and aesthetics as represented in the contested space of the art gallery, he raises the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and system.
These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of postwar art in Europe and the United States. Teeming with ideas, relentless in their pursuit of contradiction and paradox, they exhibit both the understanding of the artist (Patrick Ireland) and the precision of the scholar.
With an introduction by Thomas McEvilley and a brilliantly cogent afterword by its author, Brian O'Doherty once again leads us on the perilous journey to center to the art world: Inside the White Cube.
"These famous essays are as fresh and stimulating today as when they jumped off the pages of Artforum. Those who have not read Brian O'Doherty will relish his poetically phrased, elegantly written, and ironically tempered taunt to so many received notions about twentieth-century mainstream art."—Jan van der Marck, author of Arman
"Inside the White Cube is a brilliant analysis of the sociological, economic, and aesthetic context within which we experience art. O'Doherty examines the critical relationships of context to content and with wit and irony exposes the myth of neutrality of the gallery or museum space. These essays mark a turning point in artistic perception."—Barbara Rose
"Brian O'Doherty's Inside the White Cube has remained one of the most influential and oft-quoted statements of its time. With cogent critical analysis and shrewd wit, O'Doherty investigates how the gallery space, sequestering the spectator within an apparently timeless realm and before the pretense of the enshrined object, insidiously governs the viewer's consciousness, perception, and emotional response."—Howard N. Fox
"Brian O’Doherty’s precise scrutiny of this near-omnipresent mode of display—the result of a worldview in which the apparatus of exhibition was newly understood as itself the carrier of meaning—still retains disruptive power."
