Is the gender gap in the art world closing? Not so youād notice, but here’s a nugget of good news.
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| Couple, Carol L. Douglas |
Iāve written many times about gender issues in the art world.* I grew up at a time when there were no great women artist models. Historical figures like Artemisia Gentileschi had been expunged from the record. Abstract-Expressionism, which reigned supreme in the post-war era, was almost wholly a bad-boy phenomenon. Iām still waiting to see the inequality addressed. Iāll probably die waiting.
If you can stand the dissing of āwhite straight males,ā a recent essay in Artsy has a small bit of good news buried in it: young galleries are more likely to be run by women, and women-run galleries are slightly more likely to show work by women artists.
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| The Joker, Carol L. Douglas |
Their sample is narrow: the 200 or so galleries that showed at Art Baselin Miami Beach. Their graphing makes one wonder if they passed the sixth grade, although it looks very pretty.
Among galleries under ten years old represented at Miami, almost half were run by women. Younger galleries and women gallerists are slightly better at selling work than their male counterparts. Younger male-run galleries had 32% female artists, compared with just 23% at galleries more than 20 years old. The younger female-run galleries had 41% female artists; at the older female-run galleries, the share of female artists was 28%.
Moreover, there was better representation for women in North American galleries (36% to 64%) than in supposedly-enlightened Europe (30%-70%), and there were proportionally more American women dealers than European women dealers.
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| The Laborer Resting, Carol L. Douglas |
But even there, the differences are minor; male dealers at the high-end of the market outnumber women dealers 3 to 1. At the top end of the market, the money is overwhelmingly male. āWhen you get to the $10 million, $20 million levels, thatās where the disparity comesā¦when that amount of money is at stake, politics go out the window,ā said London dealer Pilar Corrias.
Another industry thatās famous for mouthing feminist platitudes but practicing gender bias is Hollywood. According to the Los Angeles Times, only 1.9% of directors of the top-grossing 100 films of 2013 and 2014 were women. āOf 25 Paramount Pictures films that have been announced through 2018, not a single one has a women director attached, in a tally first noted by The Wrap. The same is true of the 22 Twentieth Century Fox films that have been announcedā¦ā
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| Saran Wrap Cynic, by Carol L. Douglas |
And then thereās Congress, where only 19% of lawmakers are female, a percentage that didnāt change much in the last election.
The biggest news story of 2017 has been #metoo. One thing it ought to tell us is that where thereās huge gender disparity, thereās also sex abuse. Where there’s endless sexualization of women’s images, there’s also abuse, and the art world for the last two hundred years has been littered with insipid, pulchritudinous images of women.
The 19th and 20th century art scenes were famous for abusive, egotistical male āgeniuses.ā As Germaine Greer said about the Pre-Raphaelites, āIf they hadn’t had sex with their models, they wanted you to think they had.ā