The final chapter of Brian O’Doherty’s book Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space 1976 is called ‘Context as Content’ and discusses the disregard for the ceiling. It attributes its re-discovery to Duchamp’s 1200 Bags of Coal in 1938 when he transferred previous history’s idea of looking down to looking up, “which gently reverses the viewer into a walking stalactite.” As O’Doherty said, if invention is making us conscious of what we agree not to see 1200 Bags of Coal, while unobtrusively physically but obtrusive psychologically, invented that ceiling. He argues that with the electric light, the ceiling became an intensely cultivated garden of fixtures, and modernism simply ignored it.

“By exposing the effect of context on art, of the container on the contained, Duchamp reorganised an area of art that had not yet been invented.” Through works such as Bags of Coal and Mile of String Duchamp literalised the portrayed space of the painting, harassing the spectator resulted in this alone becoming the memorable feature and cultivating his audience through hostility. O’Doherty then goes on to discuss the unwritten function of the gallery space – the place for selling things. “The arcane social customs surrounding this – the stuff of social comedy – divert attention from the business of assigning material value to that which has none.”