Exhibition Design
Competing theories of arrangement, since covering a wall with pictures and hanging each one alone in space do not merely look different but produce different meanings.
Dictionary entry
- White Cube 1930s– / Style
White walls, even light and an unadorned room, so that only the work stands up. MoMA made it standard, and though O'Doherty's criticism exposed it as an institution disguised as neutrality, it remains the default for showing contemporary art.
- Wunderkammer 16th–18th century / Style
The early modern collection room heaped natural and man-made things, specimens and art, into one space without distinction. Its floor-to-ceiling density aimed at a model of the world, making it the ancestor of the museum and the origin of an aesthetics of collecting.
- Salon Hang 1667–19th century / Layout
The Paris Salon's way of stacking paintings frame to frame from floor to ceiling. Height announced a work's rank, and looking became competition and society. It is the exact opposite of the white cube, and its origin.
- Habitat Diorama 1889– / Style
The natural history museum format that fuses taxidermy, real foreground and curved background painting into a slice of habitat. Akeley raised it to an art, and it became the prototype of immersive display.
- Panorama 1787–1900s / Style
A giant painting covering the entire inner wall of a rotunda placed the audience at the center of the landscape. Lighting and real objects in the foreground erased the edge of the picture, and this 19th-century immersion machine became the summit of mass visual entertainment before cinema.
- Modernist Exhibition Design 1920s–1940s / Style
The modernist movement that designed the exhibition as printed matter you walk through. Lissitzky's dynamic installations and Bayer's extended field of vision invented display as an information space that edits the visitor's path and gaze.