Sexism by numbers: Guerrilla Girls ask UK public to send in statistics of females nudes vs female artists at local museums

[laylalex 7,252]

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The Guerrilla Girls need YOU. The latest project from the feminist masked avengers hits the UK next week in the form of billboards with a call to arms. It invites the British public to go to their local museums and count the number of female nudes on the walls compared to the number of female artists' work. Participants will be able to send in the numbers to a specially designed website that will display the results on a bar graph that will change over the course of a month.

"The idea that women for a long time have been in art works usually as naked bodies but rarely as artists brings up a huge question about subject versus object. We really believe that there is an element of sexism in the subject of many many many Western art works. It's right there in the art work and we want to open up that conversation," one of the anonymous members, who goes by the name of Käthe Kollwitz, tells The Art Newspaper in a podcast interview. 

 

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/sexism-by-numbers-guerrilla-girls

 

[Bettie Page 118]

Maybe statistics of female nudes vs male nudes are warranted - I mean, I could stare at Michelangelo’s David all day....

[laylalex 7,252]

As a former art history major, I cannot tell you how many dark lecture halls I had to sit in, watching image upon image of the female nude in Western art. While some of the most famous nudes are male (Michaelangelo and Donatello's Davids, Adam as depicted by Michaelangelo (again) on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Apollo Belvedere, etc.) it is the sheer ubiquity of the female nude that ends up making you feel numb and blasé about viewing yet another woman without her clothes on after a while. It normalizes the idea of woman as object -- of desire, of fertility, of male control, as a body without necessarily a mind. You only need think of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe -- the appearance of a nude female form next to two men fully and formally dressed reduces her only to her body and the reaction that summons in the viewer.

 

I will not lie though -- I agree Michaelangelo's David is perfection!

[Bettie Page 118]

It just needs to be equal - I mean there have got to be more David’s out there - as an art history did they educate you on this?

[laylalex 7,252]

Well, Donatello's David is the most famous after Michaelangelo's. And there are others out there, but Bernini's is clothed for example. 

 

Have you ever seen the massive Napoleon nude by Canova? 

[yuna628 9,532]

2 hours ago, Bettie Page said:

Maybe statistics of female nudes vs male nudes are warranted - I mean, I could stare at Michelangelo’s David all day....

In my art class growing up no nudes were allowed but we still had to study them, so I just got a grainy image of David with cardboard undies cutout and taped to the statue's body.  It was harder to do with lady statues, so there just weren't any images of them at all...

 

I took my husband to the Walther's Gallery. Tons of statues there. Plenty of nudes of all sorts. 

[Skyman 289]

I think since through  much of history women weren't allowed to be artists it goes without saying that you're going to find more male artists in museums.  It wasn't right then but you can't change history. 

[laylalex 7,252]

19 minutes ago, Skyman said:

I think since through  much of history women weren't allowed to be artists it goes without saying that you're going to find more male artists in museums.  It wasn't right then but you can't change history. 

You CAN change representation though. In the West, there have been many, many brilliant female artists since the 19th century. They are often considered "lesser" not because of talent, but because their contributions were less "important" due to (1) being a woman and (2) lack of opportunities to show their work. It's not hard to increase representation without lessening quality. 

 

There's a lot of exceedingly tedious art out there that is considered mediocre by serious critics, but still gets exhibited because the artist is "important" even though their style has gone through a major reassessment since their active years. There is plenty of room for the display of excellent art by female artists.  

[TBoneTX 43,246]

15 hours ago, laylalex said:

a specially designed website [...] will display the results on a bar graph that will change over the course of a month.

So, in other words, they want the naked truth to be known.

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

18 hours ago, laylalex said:

You CAN change representation though. In the West, there have been many, many brilliant female artists since the 19th century. They are often considered "lesser" not because of talent, but because their contributions were less "important" due to (1) being a woman and (2) lack of opportunities to show their work. It's not hard to increase representation without lessening quality. 

 

There's a lot of exceedingly tedious art out there that is considered mediocre by serious critics, but still gets exhibited because the artist is "important" even though their style has gone through a major reassessment since their active years. There is plenty of room for the display of excellent art by female artists.  

Going back to the original post, what do we think the ratio of nudes on display to the ratio of women artists will show us?  It doesn't feel like any KPI or critical success factors. Wouldn't a measure of contemporary female to contemporary male artists be a better representative shifting attitudes in the art world?  

 

My informal, unscientific survey of attitudes of museum-goers when I visit sf/ Manhattan is that people are drawn to and comment on the famous and celebrated artists.

 

At the end of your journey through the curation you will have new perspectives on the artists, the times and shifts in Zeitgeist. That is the job of the museum and staff, to educate and enrich.

 

I  have always had an abiding interest in da Vinci, if you gave me 10 hours alone with the Mona Lisa or 10 hours with a Codex, I would take the Codex everytime. 99/100 of the American population has never heard of the Codices or have any idea of their richness, almost everyone would wait in line for the Mona Lisa. 

 

 

[Dashinka 23,301]

Isn't the art/entertainment world going to be taken over by blockchain NFTs?

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

8 hours ago, Dashinka said:

Isn't the art/entertainment world going to be taken over by blockchain NFTs?

no

[Boiler 43,588]

Do we know how they identified? I see a lot of assumptions here.

[TBoneTX 43,246]

On 6/13/2021 at 1:51 AM, TBoneTX said:

So, in other words, they want the naked truth to be known.

^^ worth an upvote ^^

[Skyman 289]

On 6/12/2021 at 5:22 PM, laylalex said:

You CAN change representation though. In the West, there have been many, many brilliant female artists since the 19th century. They are often considered "lesser" not because of talent, but because their contributions were less "important" due to (1) being a woman and (2) lack of opportunities to show their work. It's not hard to increase representation without lessening quality. 

 

There's a lot of exceedingly tedious art out there that is considered mediocre by serious critics, but still gets exhibited because the artist is "important" even though their style has gone through a major reassessment since their active years. There is plenty of room for the display of excellent art by female artists.  

You could certainly change the representation but to make it even wouldn't you have to skew the history of art? In order to match the large number of older works by predominantly male artists, wouldn't your choice of newer works have to be predominantly by female artists?  Perhaps snubbing some of the better modern male artists?