Product details
- ISBN 9781041128397
- Weight: 430g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 21 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This provocative book bridges the gap between theoretical academic writings and practical museum curating, tracing the journey from 19th-century moralist art museums to today’s 21st-century inclusive civic art museums via a sustained critique of the 20th-century formalist and heteronormative white cube model of curating in art museums.
The book offers a comparative analysis of the 19th-century moralist art museum, the 20th-century formalist art museum and the 21st-century civic art museum. It critiques the white cube model, highlighting its failure to address contemporary issues of gender, identity, race and inclusivity. The author provides a clear genealogy of the white cube, detailing its six phases and charting its development and global expansion from the 1900s in Austria and Germany to the 2020s. Additionally, the book examines successful non-white cube museologies and exhibition designs before proposing a practical eight-step methodology for curatorial and exhibition design aimed at overcoming the limitations of the traditional white cube. The analysis draws on numerous detailed case studies and integrates insights from museum studies, art history, art market, collecting, institutional art systems, curatorial studies, cultural studies and practical curatorial experience.
This thought-provoking research will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of museum studies, art history, architecture and exhibition design, and especially curatorial practice.
Paco Barragán is a curator, exhibition designer and cultural theorist. His curatorial work emerges from research-through-practice operating at the intersections of curating, theory, exhibition design and institutional analysis. He has curated 99 exhibitions in the Americas, Europe and Oceania and was previously Head of the Visual Arts at Cultural Arts Centre, Matucana 100, in Santiago de Chile. He is the author of From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-Liberal Biennial: On the ‘Biennialization’ of Art Fairs and the ‘Fairization’ of Biennials (2020) and The Art Fair Age (2009) and a co-editor of The Changing Meaning of Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance (2023) and When a Painting Moves... Something Must Be Rotten (2011).
