Black cube art museum

When interactive video art was first considered for exhibitions in the respected public galleries, curators found the spaces in traditional galleries were incredibly unsuited to the new medium. The traditional art galleries had static walls designed to display 2D artworks in a hierarchal manner or 3D sculpture where it could be viewed from all angles. Out of all the mediums through which art was expressed and displayed in a gallery, none demanded so much input from the viewer's themselves. When several artists began London Video Arts (LVA), their interactive art was arranged by Tate Gallery in ways which severely hampered the way they communicated with viewers. David Hall's work reflected the movement of audiences themselves by showing images taken from a camera (facing the viewers) on a single monitor. The work was placed in a lecture room in the basement of the Tate's Education Department. The curators claimed this environment was the most appropriate since too much lighting would make it difficult to see the monitors so often used in video art.

Before moveable walls became commonly used in art museums, Installation artworks posed severe difficulties for curators. In 1960, the curators of MoMA were bewildered when Jean Tinguely and Billy Klüver created a machine that destroyed itself for the 27 minute Homage to New York exhibition. Even today, traditional museums have to go to great and expensive lengths to exhibit what has become a well-respected medium. When the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia displayed Olafur Eliasson's Take your time, walls were cut, doorways made taller and rooms darkened for the exhibition. It was becoming clear to architects that considerations would need to be made for installations, video art and digital interactive art in future galleries.

Musée du Louvre, Paris, typical of a "classical" museum.

MoMA New York, Typical of a "white cube" museum.

Many projected images or monitors are optimally viewed in low lighting. Therefore, the implementation of adjustable lighting systems was the most obvious consideration made by black cube museums. However many installations require the space itself to be controlled. The typical black cube museum would hence have movable walls in its interior. Some artists may even have preferences as to the temperature of the environment. The essential idea behind the black cube museums is that the museum should be malleable to the needs of any artwork. The Pompidou Centre is early architectural evidence of this way of thinking. However, in the Pompidou Centre, the hightech architecture form of the museum itself influences the way the artwork is viewed. The majority of black cube museums prefer to develop an environment in which artworks can be viewed objectively, an idea taken from modernist white cube museums.

New forms of art constantly develop and art museums must adapt alongside. Some black cube museums such as the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) have a large focus on film works or interactive works that use a simple keyboard and mouse. There is an argument that these works can be equally viewed from home through the internet. Indeed, some developing avant-garde forms of artwork are designed primarily to be viewed online. Works such as Automated Beacon,[2] a feedback loop of the Google search engine designed by Thomson & Craighead in 2005, perform very efficiently the role of the avant-garde and make us question "what is art?"

The Internet may be the modern Library of Alexandria but, from the perspective of art, it suffers the same flaw as classical museums. Just as the old halls of the Louvre force an artist unto two-dimensional work if he wishes to be displayed in the classical museum, so too does the Internet force all its content to conform unto the easily accessible web page. Black cube museums however, with their flexible and accommodating interiors, allow the artist total control of what we objectively experience. Able to house any form of mainstream artwork, it seems unlikely that modern black cube museums can be entirely made redundant by the Internet.