‘It’s Not the Quality of the Art That Matters, It’s Discrimination’: Excerpts From Our Interviews on Women’s Place in the Art World

To examine the evolving representation of work by
female artists in American museums and the global auction
market over the past decade, we not only delved into data, but also
conducted extensive interviews. We spoke with more than 40
people—a mix of museum directors and curators, collectors, dealers,
advisors, and academics—to document their reactions, insights, and
context to our findings. Here are excerpts from those
conversations.

Jessica Morgan, Director, Dia Art Foundation

Don’t accept the first story. Or
the second, or the third. It is only in repeated research that you
get to understand what you are looking at. The first story is the one that was documented,
which usually means there was some financial support behind
it. 

Agnes Gund, Collector

When I was taught art history,
there were very few women. There was
Marisol. [Artemisia] Gentileschi was another one. But
other than that, there weren’t many that were even mentioned.
Later, I became sort of
startled when we looked over [our] collection and there were women
that were in it, but they didn’t sell for
anything. 

Guerrilla Girl Frida Kahlo, Artist

Why is it that it took so long
for the art world to recognize that there were many mainstreams,
and if you want to tell the whole story of culture you have to
recognize all of those voices? Otherwise you are telling the
history of wealth and power. We’re far more interested in having
one of our posters on every college dorm wall than hanging over
some collector’s white sofa. 

Naima Keith, Vice President of Education and Public
Programs, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

I wonder if institutions know it
is a problem. There is a lot of discussion about women having more
exhibitions, so from the outside it seems like we are celebrating
women of different ages. But I wonder if institutions realize that
there needs to be a lot more work done. Maybe they don’t understand
how imbalanced it is. 

Martha Rosler, Artist

It’s like Hollywood: when you
are in your middle age and female, nobody is interested. Many, many
women bemoan the fact that they become invisible. And then if you
live long enough, suddenly people will say, “Oh look, there is
Carolina Herrera. There is Louise Bourgeois.” 

Connie Butler, Chief Curator, Hammer Museum

When you are dealing with an older
generation of female artists—where the market isn’t established but
you can certainly find comparables among their male, and even
female, peers—it is very difficult to defend the value that is
being asked for works. I have absolutely encountered that. It has
to do with who is in the room. If you are talking to a room full of
collectors who don’t necessarily collect this artist’s work, then
that part of the market is not one they are comfortable with
because it is not reflected in their own collection.

Mickalene Thomas, Artist

It’s a cyclical thing that is
not changing. It’s like we’re crabs: if one or two of us gets out
of the bucket, it feels so exciting. But what are we cheering? We
should be protesting! We should be pissed that only one or two made
it out. We got so settled after a little bit of growth instead of
getting infuriated about the fact that it has not really changed.
We got comfortable and allowed the system to default back to
exactly what it was, in front of our faces. We really have to
prepare our next generation and, in some way, instill some
change.

Helen Molesworth, Curator

No matter how well intentioned
people are, when they sit around the table and make a wish list,
the easiest list of names is male. It is really bad out there, and
that is why those numbers are so low. I can say all this stuff
now—that’s the joy of being fired. 

Renée Adams, Professor of Finance, Saïd Business School,
University of Oxford

Price gaps between male and
female art is higher in countries where there is more gender
inequality—which suggests it’s not the quality of the art that
matters, it’s discrimination.

Lisa Dennison, Chairman, Sotheby’s Americas

The market doubling [for work by
women at auction] is due to a small number of artists whose stars
have risen. It is disconcerting because it is not the women in
general, but the ones most sought after. 

Brooke Davis Anderson, Director, the Museum at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

The explanation that women [are
poorly represented because they] have often decided to leave the
art world? I don’t believe that for a minute. I think there have
been women working hard in the art world forever and if we haven’t
seen them, then shame on us.

Raina Lampkins-Fielder, Curator, Souls Grown Deep
Foundation

If a museum worries we are going
to lose artistic quality if we go against the canon to reinsert a
woman, I would ask that museum: if we are going to be honest with
ourselves, what we are really saying? It is just a coded way of
saying we are less interested in what women are
producing. 

Susanne Vielmetter, Owner, Vielmetter Los Angeles

Between 2000 and 2010, the first
ten years of my gallery, you could not have a conversation with a
collector saying, “I am counting the female artists in my gallery
program.” If you said that, people would think you either had some
kind of early childhood trauma—that there was something
psychologically damaged about you—or that you were so hopelessly
stuck in the 1990s identity politics era that you simply couldn’t
be helped.

Micol Hebron, Artist

I think about advertising, where
you have to repeat the company name seven times in a minute for
someone to remember it. Scale that up to art history—how many times
have we heard certain names? It gets encoded in our
subconscious. 

Melissa Chiu, Director, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden

The 1980s was the first time
women artists really were able to get recognition almost on equal
standing to their male counterparts, and in large measure [it was] because they were doing work in photography. There’s something to
be said for a new media not having the canon written already—same
for video art and performance.

Marc Payot, Vice President, Hauser & Wirth

Let’s take as our basis that men
and women are equally good artists, and then say, “Okay, if they
are equal then why is there this difference in the market?” It
starts with the galleries. They don’t represent enough women in
their program. There is also a structural issue: you need to
educate collectors and you need to confront them with
quality. 

Catherine Opie, Artist

The art market is making more
money throughout the United States than agriculture. There is
something really intense about that, and it is to do with wealth
distribution. I am an artist and I love being able to navigate this
world, but it is really curious and difficult to unpack—and at the
top end it is all resolutely male. Actually, it is male all the way
through.

Deana Haggag, President and CEO, United States
Artists

There is a sea change, and we
are watching it. But I don’t think that shift is happening at the
decision-making table. The people who have had power at these large
institutions can’t speak more than one vernacular. I feel like they
have only overwhelmingly understood how to talk about white male
artists. Anyone who breaks a canon is perceived to be
“other”. 

Andrea Fraser, artist

Museums have become increasingly
driven by the sources of funding they have access to: from their
patrons or earned income through box office. And, with that, one
loses a component of a museums’ mission—which is scholarship and
research—and that includes the critical reconsideration of art
history, partly in terms of its gender bias and racial bias. Those
things can fall under the bus.

Susan McPherson, Founder, McPherson Strategies
Consultancy

If you have more diversity in
your business, your revenues are going to increase. Why would that
be different in the nonprofit sector? Diversity will help museums
attract more patrons, more board members, bigger audiences. The
people running it can help make the business more
robust. 

Michelle Millar Fisher, Curator of Contemporary Decorative
Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

I call bullshit on the idea that
it takes a while [to see change]. How much more time does it take?
If a new generation of art historians and curators have to be
resensitized to this then my god, we have amnesia at this point. It
really comes down to people putting their money where their mouths
are. 

David Getsy, Professor of Art History, School of the Art
Institute of Chicago

It’s important to acknowledge
that the ways museums categorize artists are reliant both on
knowing the name of the artist, but also usually a binary option.
That is a real question for how trans artists fit into this. In
many ways, it’s not an urgent question for history because there
has been no place for trans artists in museums. But in thinking
about the future, the metrics must shift to reflect the fact that
we have a different understanding of gender and how discrimination
works. A study like this reminds us of all the structural obstacles
that remain to be addressed. 

William Goetzmann, Professor of Finance, Yale School of
Management 

If somebody has the money, they
could make a really big difference really quickly. If you could
give a $50,000 prize to fund five books a year on female artists,
that’s the stuff that drives the market and the museums. To make an
artist collectible, you need a catalogue raisonné. It’s fairly
cheap to fund this compared to how much the paintings would go up
in value [as a result]. 

This story is part of a research project on the presence of
work by female artists in museums and the market over the past
decade. For more, see our examination of museums;
our examination of the
market; four case studies on
museums making change; our investigation into
maternity leave in the art world; visualizations of our
findings; and our
methodology. 

The post ‘It’s Not the Quality of the Art That Matters, It’s
Discrimination’: Excerpts From Our Interviews on Women’s Place in
the Art World appeared first on artnet News.