Inside the white cube, where nothing is allowed to distract

Walk into a contemporary gallery and the building tries very hard to vanish. White walls, a grey floor polished to a soft sheen, light that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. The architecture's whole ambition is to be unnoticed.

It works, mostly. With nothing else to look at, the single photograph on the far wall acquires an almost unreasonable gravity. The emptiness is a kind of frame; the silence is a kind of spotlight.

Neutrality is the most ideological room a museum can build.

But the white cube isn't neutral, however much it pretends to be. It tells you that art is precious, separate, not to be touched — a thing apart from ordinary life. That's an argument, not an absence of one.

I love these rooms and I distrust them in equal measure. They make looking feel important, which is a gift; they also make it feel solemn, which is sometimes a loss.