In Regard to White Walls

     So I got this thought... Why are the walls of our galleries and art museums always white? Why is white the go to color of walls?
     My first idea on this, white looks CLEAN, it looks FRESH and it looks SIMPLE. With white walls one's art will POP. The viewer's mind will not be distracted. Also, a colored wall could drastically change the emotion and feel of the room. If the walls were all a gray-blue, people could subconsciously become somber and "blue". Colored walls could also not match the art work and thus detract from the over all design of the space.  
     But why not black walls? The choice against colored walls makes sense to me, but the question over black plagues my mind a bit more. My initial response and what I would guess most people's to be, is that black makes a room feel small. But why is that a problem? Diane Arbus's photographs are all tiny. When I saw them at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco past May I was shocked at their size. Although their small size forced me to really get close to her work and examine it with a keen eye, it didn't awe me. To me, that's the type of artwork I would put on a black wall with white frames. Not only would the contrast of black wall to white frame make the work stand out but it would give the illusion of larger artwork. 
     I know, I know, I offer an extremely biased idea on the size of art. In my designer eye, I would exhibit almost all colored photography like Jeff Wall, HUGE and lit up. I can't help but be drawn to his artwork from halfway across SF Moma when it is just screaming in full vibrant force, "come look at me". And putting that stuff against a black wall would make it BIGGER and BADDER (in the sense of the contrast of bold color to dark black walls). 
     I guess what I am getting at is, I want to see a gallery break this norm set by the design world to have stark white walls. I want to be shocked, I want someone to be DIFFERENT and place me in a solid black gallery. I'd love to see people's responses. There would be the ones like me, all hyped up on something so strange and then there would be the conventionalists who would just hate it because "this is not how you design a gallery". And of course, there would be the sea of opinions in between. I'm itching to hear these opinions, ideas and reactions. Someone please design a black gallery or tell me if I am naive and it has been done. In fact, I'm sure it has and I am going to start searching for one now!  


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