I am sure the answer to this question maybe obvious to alot of you but I have been thinking on this and I can't quite figure it out. Every modern art museum has their reasons which I'm sure are valid and well founded and time-tested and all that but can we just try a place where the walls are uniformely Black? Black is a non-color right? What better way to say to the art hanging on its walls, "you are the special stuff in here, I'm just a non-color." Is the reason we don't do black walled museums because of the lighting? Is that it? The white walls illuminate the whole space, the floor, the people. Is that it? Would dark walls just be a big drag? Can't we try hanging a beautiful Keith Herring painting or an Edward Hopper or a Rembrandt or who the hell ever, on solidly dark walls yet properly lit with the right lights and see how it goes?
Has this been tried ad nauseum in the past and failed? Maybe it would feel more solemn at the Whitney if this were the case. Maybe solid black walls throughout would make everyone sub-consciously think about death. I mean even at moma we are re looking at dead people or things painted by other now dead people. And I know certain galleries that do not subscribe to this system and given the right context it seems to work out very well for them. And I'm sure there are a few art museums in the country that experiment with shades of colors on their walls but still.
Wouldn't the power of each indivdual painting supercede everything anyways? How does the wall color effect the way we look at a painting on the wall? Does it matter? It must, because every major art museum in New York and I gather just about all of the rest of the country does this whole, "Every modern painting must have white walls!"
It's the standard practice by now of course. I just wonder about seeing one of those big wall sized Jackson Pollacks with those flinging colors and popping whirls in a room lit up where everything else was complete darkness. Who knows.
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