Despite encouraging signs of women’s improved status and visibility in the art world, there are still major systemic problems. Women artists are in a far better position today than they were 45 years ago due to access to higher art education, which women have historically been denied. However, due to institutional power structures, it’s “impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius” (Nochlin 24).
Women have been involved in the making of art throughout history, but their work has been/is often ignored, undervalued, and wrongly attributed to men.
Prevailing stereotypes about the sexes have caused certain media, such as textile or fiber arts, to be primarily associated with women, despite having once been categories in which both men and women participate.
Additionally, art forms such as textile and fabric arts have been demoted to categories like "arts and crafts", rather than fine art.
In 2014, Artnet News asked 20 of the most powerful women in the art world if they felt the industry was biased and received an immediate “yes.” Several were museum directors who argued that the senior management, predominantly male, had a stranglehold on the institutions, and often prevented them from instituting substantive change. According to a study “The Gender Gap in Art Museum Directorships,” conducted by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), female art-museum directors earn substantially less than their male counterparts, and upper-level positions are most often occupied by men. The good news is that, while in 2005 women ran 32 percent of the museums in the United States, they now run 42.6 percent—albeit mainly the ones with the smallest budgets. Discrimination against women at the top trickles down into every aspect of the art world, including gallery representation, press coverage, and inclusion in permanent collection displays and solo-exhibition programs. A glance at the past few years of special-exhibition schedules at major art institutions in the United States, for instance, especially the presentation of solo shows, reveals the continued prevalence of gender disparity. Of all the solo exhibitions since 2007 at the Whitney Museum, 29 percent went to women artists. Some statistics have improved. In the year 2000, the Guggenheim in New York had zero solo shows by women, while 14 percent of the solo exhibitions were by women in 2014.
Permanent collection displays at major art institutions are also imbalanced. With the opportunity to reinstall collections at museums, many curators are not daring enough to change the dominant narratives in ways that offer new perspectives. In 2009, however, the Centre Pompidou took the bold step of organizing the nearly two-year exhibition where the head of contemporary collections, Camille Morineau, reinstalled the museum’s permanent collection with only women artists. Attendance to this permanent collection increased by 25 percent.
The exhibition was a revolutionary gesture because nobody counted the number of men and women in exhibits before, and very few people noticed that sometimes there are no women at all. It took Camille six years to convince the director, Alfred Pacquement, that it was a sound exhibition proposal.
The show forced the Pompidou to broaden its holdings of artwork created by women through purchases and donations, but two years later in the re-hang of the permanent collection, only 10 percent of the works on view were by women, and the purchase funds for women artists almost immediately dried up.
The Pompidou is not alone in carrying out discriminatory practices. In 2012, only 4 percent of artists on display at the Metropolitan Museum were women. It’s not much better at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When the museum opened its new building in 2004 with a reinstallation of the permanent collection, 16 out of the 410 works on display (4 percent) were by women. Even fewer works were by artists of color. In April 2015, only 7 percent of the works on display were by women.
Women still get less coverage than men in magazines and newspapers. Male artists are also more often featured in advertisements and on the covers of art magazines. For example, in 2014, Artforum featured a female artist only once on its front cover. Consider the September 2014 issue of Artforum, which featured Jeff Koons on the cover: of the 73 advertisements associated with galleries in New York, only 11 (15 percent) promoted solo exhibitions by women. It’s worse considering the number of articles and reviews dedicated to solo exhibitions that prefer males to females. In the December issue of ARTnews, 17 of the 29 reviews were devoted to solo shows of men artists and 4 to solo shows of women artists. Year-end “best of” articles show what Katha Pollitt called the “Smurfette Principle,” which found that most children’s programs, such as the “Smurfs,” have a majority of male characters, with just one female included. This is the case with the “Best of 2005” issue of Artforum, where only 11 of the 69 solo exhibition slots were given to women. That’s only 7.6 percent, but in just ten years there was a good amount of improvement. 36 women artists were highlighted out of 95 solo shows (34.2 percent) in Artforum’s “Best of 2014” issue.
In 2013, artist Micol Hebron started the project Gallery Tally. Over 1,500 artists have participated in it. Each artist calculated gallery statistics and then designed a poster that showed male/female percentages. By Hebron’s estimation, about 30 percent of the artists represented by commercial galleries in the United States are women. In the report from October 2014, Gallery Tally looked at over 4,000 artists represented in L.A. and New York. Of those artists, 32.3 percent were women. “There is still a real problem with who’s getting opportunities, who is getting shown, who is getting collected, who’s getting promoted, and who’s getting written about,” Hebron says.
The December 2014 issue of Vanity Fair featured an article titled “Prima Galleristas” (a.k.a. “The Top 14 Female Art Dealers”). The fact that few of these “galleristas” actually support women artists was left unsaid. At an auction, the highest price paid to date for a work by a living woman artist is $7.1 million for a Yayoi Kusama painting, and the highest result for a living man was an editioned sculpture by Jeff Koons, which sold for $58.4 million. The most ever paid for a work by a deceased woman artist is $44.4 million for a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, versus $142.4 million for a Francis Bacon triptych. These numbers contribute to how women artists are ranked, in terms of their market viability. The annual list Kunstkompass (“Art Compass”) claims to announce “the world’s 100 greatest artists.” It bases its statistics on the prestige and frequency of publications, exhibitions, press coverage, and the median price of one work of art. In the 2014 edition, 17 of the 100 “great artists” were women. Artfacts.net does its own ranking based on art market sales. 11 women made it into the top 100 slots in their 2015 report. In 2014 Artnet.com revealed a list of the “Top 100 Living Artists, 2011–14,” examining the last five years of the market, with just five women listed. Each year Artprice.com draws up an international report on the contemporary art market seen through the prism of auction sales. They then present the top 500 artists according to turnover. In its 2014 report, there were only 3 women in the top 100. Amy Cappellazzo, an art advisor and former head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s, believes that the market is “steadily improving for women at a faster clip in the last five years than in the previous 50 years.” As for the fact that we are still far from equality, she adds, “we cannot go backward and fully amend the iniquity and inequality of the past.” Finally, she says, “there are aspects of markets one can influence, but there are vast other parts that are like the weather”.
We cannot begin to fix the structural problems if we cannot help others to see them. What can we do to promote fair representation in the art world? How can we get those in the art world to accept, recognize, and acknowledge that there is inequality between the sexes? How can we educate disbelievers who maintain the belief that signs of improvement mean the battle has been won? Linda Nochlin urges women to “be fearless, speak up, work together, and consistently make trouble.” You can’t just talk about feminism, you need to live it. Don’t wait for change to come—be proactive. Call out institutions, curators, critics, gallerists, and collectors for sexist practices. If, as feminist theorist Hélène Cixous argues, a “well-adjusted” woman is silent, static, invisible, then an unruly, speaking woman is the loud woman-on-top violating the “natural order” of things. Similarly, in her new book Women in Dark Times (Bloomsbury, 2014) Jacqueline Rose argues that feminism today needs a new, louder, bolder, and more scandalous language. Cultural critic bell hooks also emphasize the importance of women standing their ground, and they urge all writers from oppressed groups to speak and talkback, a term which she uses to define the movement from object to subject. “Speaking is not solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless. As such, it is a courageous act—as such, it represents a threat.” To talk back is to liberate one’s voice.
The common idea that women are treated equally in the art world needs to be challenged. The existence of a few superstars/token achievers does not mean that women artists have achieved equality. The more one examines art-world statistics, the more obvious it becomes that, despite decades of feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, queer activism and theorizing, the majority continues to be defined as white, Euro-American, privileged, heterosexual, and, above all, male. Sexism is still so insidiously woven into the logic of the mainstream art world that it often goes undetected. Change, however difficult, is not impossible but will probably not occur until more people (men and women) express their dissatisfaction with the status quo. More women artists need to stop internalizing setbacks and start realizing that the obstacles they face are evidence of gender-based discrimination. Collectors, who have the power to sway auction experts and gallerists, need to get curious about all they have been missing. Lastly, founders and directors of all those new museums need to demand equal footing for women artists in their programming.
Writer: Lauren White
Editor: Leah Tovar
Sources:
Comments