Though exhibition practices have been scrutinized for decades, the formalist ‘white cube’ remains an international gallery standard for the exhibition of modern and contemporary artwork. Simon Sheikh recently revisited Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 essay “Inside the White Cube,” assessing its continued relevance in light of the sustained ubiquity of the formalist exhibition practice. Sheikh identifies that “gallery spaces and museums are still white cubes, and their ideology remains one of commodity fetishism and eternal value(s)”, a contention that bore significant weight when it was published in 2009.[1] The sustained predominance of the white-cube is especially fraught with respect to the art market in post bailout New York, wherein a recession era boom speaks powerfully to the character of American late-capitalism. This circumstance indicates the artist’s subservience to the inordinately wealthy, and complicity in their gratuitous consumer desires in an era of severe and increasing economic stratification. Though the formalist exhibition practice remains an almost unquestioned tradition there is fairly widespread consensus with regard to the formalist critical paradigm’s chauvinism and obsolescence. A number of artists and critics deride modern formalism because it has historically privileged artists, whose work is not framed with respect to identity, thereby trivializing the works of artists who are canonically and/or socially marginalized. But even these artists’ works are almost always exhibited in the inert, white walled formalist gallery – even if critics and curators invariably interpret their work with respect to biography and identity. This pernicious double bind speaks to the paradoxes of the supremacy of formalist values in the contemporary art world.

My concerns therefore extend well beyond Walter Robinson’s recently popular notion of "Zombie Formalism", since the formalist paradigm dictates the exhibition of nearly all artwork, no matter how ‘anti’ formalist it might be. That even ephemeral and dematerialized works are easily subsumed into museums and collections through the documentary photograph, for example, reflects the unabating supremacy of western formalism and commodity fetishism over contemporary art. If formalist works and the formalist critical lens are widely seen as obsolete, to the extent that contemporary exhibition of formalist works now recalls the undead, why does it continue to dominate art exhibition standards?