Comments on: Girls Just Want To Have FUNDS: What is the problem with gender and the art market?

By: JoAnn Chartier

JoAnn Chartier — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 04:51:57 +0000

Female artist here, with gallery representation in a high end beach resort town on the west coast. Right there you can already see the biases forming — and it is not just ‘female’.

“A girl and she’s not in NY, LA — not even Chicago? A beach resort? OMG, flowers and blurry seascapes with that transparent wave curl — so, who’s her mentor? Never heard of him. Next…

Actually, there is a lot of life in art out past flyover country. Our scene doesn’t reek so much of investment opportunities and one upmanship. I like that about my art world, in my studio with the affordable art that covers expenses and the six foot experimental canvases that I can get passionate about, even if they are more difficult to sell. I believe in color and structure and inspirational side trips — and I enjoy my work and struggle as much as any artist, I suppose, but at least I’m free of the hedge fund manager influence that manipulates a market in order to put a rotting shark in a leaky tank at a gullible museum.

To the point of your story: I hear you, but I don’t see how you can force the gender issue because the art world where you are is not interested. In the art world where I live, my gallery rep is female, and so is the owner and all the staff. She accepts some men to her walls, as long as they measure up to the quality of her successful women artists. I like that, too.

And, if you go up a few levels on the issue — where is the ‘gender equal’ discussion in the current political arena of this country? Heading down to barefoot and pregnant…

By: Suzy Spence

Suzy Spence — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:21:34 +0000

It’s essential that earlier works by women are appropriately historicized and revered, in order that art by younger generations is properly valued. Until that happens, I don’t think we’ll see much change in the market. For a recent salon discussion I organized, we imagined an auction of “Eight Masterpieces of Feminist Art from a Distinguished American Collection.” We had an actual catalog on hand as reference from a fall sale at Sotheby’s in which Eight Abstract Expressionist works were displayed in color format, accompanying bios and heroic black and white photography of New York school artists (seven men, one woman) included. Simply playing a game of swapping art by Judy Chicago and Lynda Benglis with those of Willem DeKooning and Jackson Pollock revealed aspects of marketing salesmanship that depends upon inflated, superlative language aimed at driving prices up, even beyond the five million or more that was asked of a single work of art. Besides noticing that grandeur isn’t associated with these artists (yet), the text at the beginning of the catalog, written by auctioneer Tobias Meyer, shows an overall historical bias. He leaves out Feminist Art completely, when he sets the contextual stage for the era the collection was established. According to Meyer, the movement itself doesn’t exist, as he says, “by the time Sidney and Dorothy Kohl decided to form a collection of Abstract Expressionism, the paintings they set out to find were not more than 25 years old. It is as if a collector today was looking for the best of the 1990s. New York by 1970 had seen Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptualism but it also retained an acute consciousness of the heroes of the earlier years…”

By: Deborah Forbes

Deborah Forbes — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 06:28:58 +0000

(My website is still under construction but viewable)
If you visit my recent Facebook postings you’ll find quotes there from the ‘Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art” book which contains some excellent commentary on the status of women in the arts. It is a persistent problem, though some men who responded to these quotes from the book on my FB page argue to the contrary, it confounds how it never seems to find a lasting solution. I think that some women artists who refuse the label of ‘feminist’ and wish to avoid the subject contribute to the problem, placing their faith in those few women who have ‘made it’ over the wall as their justification for turning away from the discourse which challenges the museological / institutional gender bias that persists except for the very few!

By: Lee

Lee — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:51:02 +0000

Great article.

As a male collector, I never look at whether or not an artwork I purchase is by a male or female–just whether or not I love it, can afford it, if I have a space for it. As it happens, about 1/3 of what I own are by women artists.

But this article points out that my 1/3 was made more difficult by the galleries lack of female representation which I had never actually noticed. If all I am seeing at galleries are men artists, it is even harder.

I think and hope as more galleries are owned by women, as more women are promoted to high positions at male owned galleries, that women artists will be more represented. But Mr. Bao is correct in that paying the rent trumps gender equality.

It is helpful that people are at least noticing this problem and trying to do something. I wish I had been in town for the panel discussion. Sorry to have missed it.