Inside the White Cube - The Ideology of the Gallery Space

This book by Brian O'Doherty was very informative about the history and development of the gallery space. The gallery, essentially a kind of specialty shop that made deliberate choices about presentation fore its product. Even as commerce stole the monopoly that religion had on art, it then mimicked it with the chapel-like setting of the white cube that is a gallery space.

The reaction of artists to this containing and commodifying of their sensibility was all out revolt.
Attacks upon the gallery space itself reached a level both outrageous and absurd, but these attacks were constantly diffused by instant commodification. Nevertheless I greatly appreciate these last dying gasps off the artist's attempt to avoid being integrated as an economic interest.

His afterword has a note of resignation, "History in art is, ultimately, worth money." p. 109

I think what he is noting is, the contamination of a craft by the practice of business, as Socrates would say. Much like that way that Sony is not interested in the craft of stereo making, they are merely in the business of selling stereos - and when that is the general nature of things, even in an art world, then the integrity of the product suffers.