Salon experience - haircut  not included

Last year SUPERSWEET enjoyed a cathartic rant over ‘Art in White Spaces’ – white-cubed galleries boasting conceptually high ceilings, Colgate-white walls and an institutionalized fan-base of smug cheese-sucking patrons. Oh yes, and the art.

After decades of Saatchi-cum-Tate-cum-white-washed homogeneity, collectively known as ‘the best possible environment in which to display the best quality art’ has instead come to signify the very opposite to its original noble intent. Like a boob job gone 5 cups over-fill, it’s no longer a perfect coupling but an augmented, grotesque spectacle unable to feed the mouths of the young as god intended.  Yes, that was the best analogy we could muster.

The original purpose of the white cube: Reverse your Tardis back to circa 1900. Galleries resemble the homes of the rich – bourgeoisie wallpapers create visual noise, curling their motifs jungle-like through cluttered paintings, in rooms and up stairwells; decadence is shoved frame against golden frame in a bid to exhibit the fullest, richest, most exotic art collection one whiskered panel of gallery owners could amass. And like their counterparts, Sloanie homes hosted collections in the same vein: luring society’s affluent over the doorstep was a personal, social triumph.