Overview
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 21- st century inclusive civic art museums via a sustained critique of the 20th-century formalist and hetero-normative 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 8-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.
Full Product Details
Author: Paco Barragán
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
ISBN: 9781041128397
ISBN 10: 1041128398
Pages: 158
Publication Date: 17 April 2026
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Availability: Not yet available
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Reviews
Paco Barragán’s book is a breath of fresh air in museological literature. Drawing on examples from antiquity to the present, he offers a passionate and persuasive argument that the ‘white cube’ does not deserve the dominance it has enjoyed for decades. Andreas Blühm, Professor Art History and former Head of Exhibitions & Display Van Gogh Museum Paco Barragán’s book dismantles many of the popular notions surrounding contemporary art’s most dominant exhibition model – the white cube – and the historical conditions that contributed to its creation and establishment. Well-researched, witty, provocative, informative, polemical, at times infuriating, Barragán’s writing is challenging but ultimately thought-provoking – the essential ingredient of every good book. Michele Robecchi, Editor Phaidon Press Paco Barragán dives polemically, but with great knowledge and depth into the problematics of exhibition spaces, offering for sure food for thought, not just for curators and art historians, but also for artists, dealers and exhibition designers. This book is like a civilized stranger that joins your table in the bar and leaves you perplexed. Max Ryynänen, Lecturer Visual Culture Alvar Aalto University
Author Information
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).
