Inside the white cube

"When these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translated - the three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. This edition also includes "The Gallery as a Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the others." "O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery were based. Concerned with the complex and sophisticated…