Institutional critique is framed as a border-politics of “inside/outside” that museums actively manage through recuperation: disruptive acts must be nominalized as performance, spatialized into the white cube, and thereby neutralized into legible, collectible critique. By disentangling conceptual “dematerialization” from post-Fordist “immaterial labor,” the text tracks how authorship, withdrawal, and subversive access (from D’Arcangelo to Lawler, Magid, and Khalili) expose the museum’s infrastructural entanglement with capitalist, racialized state power—where critique is permitted, priced, and policed rather than emancipatory.

White-cube gallery space is theorized as a historically produced, ideologically saturated apparatus that masquerades as neutral in order to suspend social time, confer timeless aura, and secure art’s commodity status through an architectonics of transcendence. Reframed as a hinge between modernism and postmodern spatial/institutional critique, O’Doherty’s method generalizes into a comparative politics of inside/outside—where context becomes content and critical practice must restage the conditions of visibility, exclusion, and value-production.