page_title: Black cube art museum
section_title: Problems with video art and installations
hierarchical_section_title: Black cube art museum / Development / Problems with video art and installations
caption_attribution_description: Palais du Louvre
context_page_description: A black cube art museum is a term used by some scholars referring to the type of art museum that is architecturally designed or renovated with special consideration for the particular needs of modern digital art, installation art, and video art. The development of the black box art museums originated from a need to accommodate these works in a better way than was previously possible in earlier art museums in the classic style or "white cube" style. Although earlier examples exist, black cube museums have been most prevalent from the 1990s onwards.
context_section_description: 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.
caption: Musée du Louvre, Paris, typical of a "classical" museum.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2008:12:17 17:58:59", "Image Artist": "Robert Maka", "Image Copyright": "Robert Maka 2008", "Image ExifOffset": "220", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "0", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "0", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1280", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "850"}