By 1976 the White Cube aesthetic was being criticised by Brian O´Doherty as a modernist obsession. In Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery ...
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Space, he argued that in an easel painting the frame was the window through which one saw the world, and that required a wall for context. When the frame is gone and the wall is white, in O´Doherty´s view, perspective and formal composition are absent. O´Doherty describes the flatness of Monet as eroding the line of an edge, and sees the White Cube as redefining the picture plane. O´Doherty argues that it becomes no longer enough to use the white wall as a frame to the art, but in Modernism it becomes necessary to redefine the work to exploit it, to fill it. He writes that the spectator must ask: "Where must I stand?"