These essays explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art, seeking to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery was based.

Using a reprint of the first translation of Brian O'Doherty's influential book Inside the White Cube, Yann Sérandour inscribes himself into the history of Conceptualism by interpolating texts from books addressing similar themes into O'Doherty's volume. Sérandour's détournements raise the stakes for the art of appropriation.

Today, the moving image is ubiquitous in global contemporary art. The first book to tell the story of the postwar expanded cinema that inspired this omnipresence, Between the Black Box and the White Cube travels back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the rise of television caused movie theaters to lose their monopoly over the moving image, leading cinema to be installed directly alongside other forms of modern art. Explaining that the postwar expanded cinema was a response to both developments, Andrew V. Uroskie argues that, rather than a formal or technological innovation, the key change for artists involved a displacement of the moving image from the familiarity of the cinematic theater to original spaces and contexts. He shows how newly available, inexpensive film and video technology enabled artists such as Nam June Paik, Robert Whitman, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Breer, and especially Andy Warhol to become filmmakers. Through their efforts to explore a fresh way of experiencing the moving image, these artists sought to reimagine the nature and possibilities of art in a post-cinematic age and helped to develop a novel space between the “black box” of the movie theater and the “white cube” of the art gallery. Packed with over one hundred illustrations, Between the Black Box and the White Cube is a compelling look at a seminal moment in the cultural life of the moving image and its emergence in contemporary art.

"Studio and Cube is author Brian O'Doherty's long-awaited follow-up to his seminal 1976 essays for Artforum, republished in 1999 as "Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space." That critically acclaimed volume dissected the abstract, white space of the modern art gallery, calling it "the archetypal image of twentieth-century art." In Studio and Cube O'Doherty turns his attention to the moment of art's creation, exploring the mystique of the artist's studio as the fecund space where inspiration occurs and the artwork is born." "Tracking the relationship between artist and artwork from Vermeer through late modernism, the author considers the differing work spaces of Courbet, Matisse, Rothko, Bacon, Warhol, and many others. He speculates on the implications of the work's transfer from the more anarchic and personal environment of the studio to the art gallery, concluding with a reflection on the way the "unruly energies" of the new media have transformed the classical white-cube gallery today. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of contemporary art and the environments in which it is produced. Studio and Cube is the first in the series of FORuM Project Publications produced by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University."--BOOK JACKET.

Since the late nineteenth century, museums have been cited as tools of imperialism and colonialism, as strongholds of patriarchalism, masculinism, homophobia and xenophobia, and accused both of elitism and commercialism. But, could the museum absorb and benefit from its critique, turning into a critical museum, into the site of resistance rather than ritual? This book looks at the ways in which the museum could use its collections, its cultural authority, its auratic space and resources to give voice to the underprivileged, and to take an active part in contemporary and at times controversial issues. Drawing together both major museum professionals and academics, it examines the theoretical concept of the critical museum, and uses case studies of engaged art institutions from different parts of the world. It reaches beyond the usual focus on western Europe, America, and ’the World’, including voices from, as well as about, eastern European museums, which have rarely been discussed in museum studies books so far.