Brian O’Doherty (Also known as Patrick Ireland), is an Irish, art critic and writer born in 1928. His book Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space is a collection of essays that appeared in Artforum Magazine in 1976, with those three issues being almost impossible to obtain, this book is highly commended in the art world. This expanded edition features ‘The Gallery as a Gesture’, a critically acclaimed piece written 10 years after the rest. Curators and other art writers considered his Inside the White Cube ‘one of the most influential and oft-quoted statements of it’s time’ (N. Fox, 2010). His poetic criticism and in-depth analysis of 20th century art is still very much relevant today. With dry wit and educated curiosity, O’Doherty explores the crisis of Post-war and he relationship between the social, economical and aesthetic factors that held an importance over modern art in a gallery setting. In my honest opinion, I bit off a lot more than I could chew with this book as I struggled to understand the authors expansive vocabulary, this subsequently led me to looks up certain terminologies mentioned. Thus, learning a great deal of terminology, useful for writing about art and its theories, especially in a gallery context.
O’Doherty B. (2010) Inside the White Cube. Berkeley: University of California Press, p 12.