Fear of Empty Rooms

What the reference work says about cenophobia

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias defines cenophobia as fear of empty rooms, open places and barren spaces, and adds that the fear may be related to Agoraphobia. That is the entry.

The three objects it names are not obviously one thing:

• an empty room is bounded and contains nothing
• an open place is unbounded
• a barren space is a landscape that fails to contain what a landscape usually holds

What they share is an absence where something is expected, which is a different object from the space itself. The Greek supports that reading: kenos means empty, so the word names the emptiness rather than the room.

The agoraphobia connection the entry offers works for one of the three and not for the others. Agoraphobia is about the difficulty of getting out, which applies to an open place and not to a bare room, and the entry does not pursue the point.

Why an art critic wrote the symptom list

In December 2009 the critic John Perreault, writing on his Artopia blog, reviewed the reception of the Whitney's exhibition Roni Horn a.k.a. Roni Horn. His target was a review by Roberta Smith of the New York Times, which had objected that the work was given too much acreage in the galleries and that two floors were one floor too many.

Perreault's response is the passage: what the complaint exposes, he writes, is horror vacui, cenophobia, whose symptoms still plague the art world, and he lists them as feelings of panic, terror, dread, anxiety and rapid heartbeats when faced with empty or near-empty rooms. He then adds that Aristotle was wrong and nature does not abhor a vacuum, on the grounds that there is a great deal of emptiness among the stars.

That is the most detailed account of the reaction that the sources hold, and it is a rhetorical device in a dispute about hanging paintings. Nobody has described a patient.

Why horror vacui does the same work

Cenophobia's usable meaning in practice is the one Perreault gives it: an inability to leave a space empty. Horror vacui, dread of the void, is the established term for that in art history and in design, where it names the impulse to fill every part of a surface. Perreault uses the two as synonyms and the substitution is unremarkable in that field.

That places the word alongside topophobia, which also survives mainly outside psychiatry, in a discipline where it describes a group's aesthetic reaction rather than an individual's disorder.

What the internet calls the same feeling

The reaction to an empty space that has a large audience now is the liminal space, the environment built for people and photographed without them: an airport terminal at midnight, a school corridor in July, a drained swimming pool. The vocabulary that describes it comes from anthropology rather than psychiatry, from Arnold van Gennep's account of ritual thresholds in 1909 and Victor Turner's expansion of it in 1969, and it names a quality of the place rather than a fear in the viewer.

That the internet's version of dread at an empty room reached for an anthropologist's word rather than the Greek one is a fair measure of how little currency cenophobia has.