Stuck in the Dark Ages: A Woman’s Place in the Art World
Women's artwork being less valuable than men's has been an ongoing topic for centuries. There has been little progress on gender equality in the art market and various research indicates strong evidence for discrimination against female artists, begging the question–how this is still possible in the 21st century?
Today, the top-earning artists are Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, and Gerhard Richter. Disappointingly, there aren’t any female artists in the group and even more so, not even among the top forty artists in the world.
Clockwise: Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin. Composite © Artnet News. Courtesy of Getty Images.
As of 2019, ArtNet found that 96.1% of sales at auction are works by male artists with women making up only 4% of the art market. When examining the auction results from 2008 to 2019, more than $196.6 billion was spent on artworks collectively. Of that figure, only $4 billion in sales accounts for women's work, approximately 2% of the market. $1.6 billion of the $4 billion in women’s sales was exclusively spent on the current top five selling women artists worldwide: Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Agnes Martin.
Courtesy of Artnet News and In Other Words at Art Agency, Partners.
“The numbers are devastating. We think we are going in the right direction, but the perception has changed more than the reality. If you take away the top five female artists, in essence, nothing has changed.”
Freelands Foundation is an arts organisation that prioritises the representation of women artists in Great Britain. Recent research has found that the number of women studying art and design is higher than men–with 75% of graduates in the art world being female. Despite a higher total number of female art and design students, artworks produced by women are still less valued than artworks produced by men and only a few make it to the top of the market. Even though more women study and work in visual arts, women still earn less and are widely underrepresented in the industry. Although societal norms and cultural stereotypes have evolved throughout history, art world inequality still exists.
Courtesy of Freelands Foundation and Representation of Women Artists in Britain during 2020 by Dr. Kate McMillan.
An experiment conducted by Goethe University found that when participants were asked to guess a painting’s artist and rate how much they liked the artwork, they could not decipher the artist's gender from the paintings. Further, when participants assumed a painting was by a woman artist, they appreciated it less. In similar experiments with computer-generated images assigned to fake female and male artists, participants enjoyed the works attributed to female artists less than the works attributed to male artists.
Guerrilla Girls: The Art Of Behaving Badly, Published by Chronicle Books 2020.
Scholars argue that cultural stereotypes and gender norms result in artistic differences between men and women, impacting the type of work created. For example, in the contemporary art market, there are more textile works by women artists compared to men. This discrepancy is not because men are incapable but instead results from past cultural stereotypes in which textiles were perceived as a "female job.” The median prices for artworks made by men are much higher than those made by women in nearly all art sectors. Men dominate almost all of the art market segments including installation, painting, works on paper, and watercolour. Interestingly, textiles and works on paper are the only two medians where price equality is achieved. There is a strong influence on people's perception of art and artists as some topics are naturally perceived as more feminine.
Courtesy of Taylor Whitten Brown and “Art Market” at Artsy.
Despite all marginal improvements on the increased representation of female artists, recent research by Luxembourg University found that upper-class male participants visiting galleries have a lower appreciation of the works they associate with female artists. Further, art world dealers and galleries are more sceptical towards representing female artists and ascribe a higher potential to men, with a dismal 13.7% of living female artists represented by galleries in Europe and North America. This potential scepticism towards female artists stems from the fact that a woman might be more likely to take time off for children and family. A woman artist, therefore, has a less reliable career than a man from a business point of view. Research has also found that women face more career challenges after leaving art school than their male counterparts, as they have less access to specific social circles and career-defining connections.
Courtesy of Art Agency, Partners from Where Women Outpace Men in the Market.
This art world disparity remains a hot topic, however, analysis indicates that investing in female artists is more profitable over time as the value of their work increases exponentially. The Sotheby's Mei Moses Art Index shows that works by female artists bought in 2012 and sold in 2018 have increased in value by 72.9%. Therefore, investing in female artists can be more profitable, simultaneously decreasing gender inequality in the art market overall. In the words of New York art advisor Liz Parks, “Who pulled out their stone tablet and wrote that male artists are better than female artists? Time to put away your chisel and step out of the Dark Ages.”
References
Adams, R., Krrussl, R., Navone, M. and Verwijmeren, P., 2017. Is Gender in the Eye of the Beholder? Identifying Cultural Attitudes with Art Auction Prices. SSRN Electronic Journal.
Brown, T., 2019. Why Is Work by Female Artists Still Valued Less Than Work by Male Artists?. [online] Artsy. <https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-work-female-artists-valued-work-male-artists>.
Halperin, J., 2017. The 4 Glass Ceilings: How Women Artists Get Stiffed at Every Stage of Their Careers | Artnet News. [online] Artnet News. <https://news.artnet.com/market/art-market-study-1179317> .
Halperin, J. and Burns, C., 2019. Female Artists Represent Just 2 Percent of the Market. Here’s Why—and How That Can Change | Artnet News. [online] Artnet News. <https://news.artnet.com/womens-place-in-the-art-world/female-artists-represent-just-2-percent-market-heres-can-change-1654954>.
Alinda Kring
Contributing Writer, MADE IN BED