Artist Adrian Piper Responds to Our Special ‘Women’s Place in the Art World’ Report

Last week, artnet News published a research project
in collaboration with In Other Words titled “Women’s Place in the
Art World: Why Recent Advancements for Female Artists Are Largely
an Illusion.” We examined the presence of women in museums and the
market over the past decade and found that, despite public
perception, progress has in fact been quite limited. The
report includes an examination of museums;
an examination of the
market; four case studies on
museums making change; visualizations of our
findings; an investigation into
maternity leave in the art world; art-world
reactions to the data; and our
methodology. 

In response to the project, artist Adrian Piper wrote the
following letter pointing out an important factor she felt was
missing. Read her text in full below. 

In your “Special Report: Women’s Place in
the Art World,” I counted nine of your
interviewees who expressed frustration with the inadequate
information available to collectors, board members, museums, and
curators about the work of women artists. For example, Michelle
Millar Fisher, Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts, Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, comments, “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.”
Artist Andrea Fraser deplores the dominance of “mass-marketing of
the taste of the wealthiest and most influential collectors” over
“the idea that we need to educate the public and not cater to
established tastes and the spectacle of fame or of genius.” And
Agnes Gund, collector, recalled, “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.”

You yourselves echo this
frustration with the art world’s pervasive ignorance of art by
women at least five times. For example, you note that “there is
less research published on the work of women, which makes it more
difficult to create value around them.” You warn the reader that
“given the current perception gap between people’s sense of
progress and the reality about the discernible lack of it, perhaps
one of the key takeaways is that the stories we tell
ourselves—about our museums and our societies—are not to be
trusted.” And you recount what happened “[w]hen a female artist
made auction history last October… a man nonetheless managed to
steal the limelight. Five bidders had vigorously pursued British
artist Jenny Saville’s 1992 painting of a fleshy female nude at
Sotheby’s, pushing the price to £9.5 million with fees ($12.5
million) and setting a world record for a living female artist. Yet
attention was swiftly diverted when onlookers noticed that the
final lot of the evening, Banksy’s Girl With Balloon (2006), had suddenly begun to shred
itself. By the following morning, the self-destructing
Banksy was international news, while Saville was a historical
footnote.”

The text above in boldface is
the only reference to the role of the press that I could find in
your 30-page report. Then I counted the number of issues of your
newsletter that have headlined Banksy since your first report of
the “self-destructing Banksy” on October 6, 2018. Since then,
artnet News has announced Banksy’s work as its lead article 24
times. By contrast, you have not headlined Jenny Saville’s work
even once.

But let’s look at the example I
know best. artnet News did not report my winning the Golden Lion
for Best Artist at the 2015 Venice Biennale. artnet News did not
include my 2018 MoMA retrospective among your 2018 museum previews.
artnet News—alone among all major US art publications—did not
review the exhibition. And in your three-part Best Exhibitions of
2018 survey of “globetrotting art aficionados” (December 17, 19, and 21, 2018), your daily
newsletter curiously neglected even to announce Part
Three, in which my
retrospective was chosen twice.

Your report claims to identify
the most significant factors that contribute to the art world’s
irresponsible treatment of art by women with regard to
institutional and gallery representation, collector acquisition,
and auction visibility. It repeatedly targets and deplores the
effect of insufficient information, research, and education in
preventing women artists from achieving visibility and parity in
these areas. Yet everyone knows that the press is the most powerful
arbiter of what is considered worth discussing, teaching,
exhibiting, collecting, and auctioning. It is remarkable that your
report neglects to examine what is arguably the most significant
factor of all in perpetuating the invisibility of art made by
women. It says nothing about artnet News’s own role in protecting
the status quo. This omission undermines the credibility of your
efforts.

You conclude your report with
suggestions for improvement. Yet you decline to consider the impact
on rectifying these injustices that the press, and artnet News in
particular, could have by simply choosing its content more
impartially and subjecting its own editorial values to greater
critical self-reflection. 

Adrian Piper

Do you have a response to our project? We’d love to hear
from you. Please send your responses—from criticism to personal
experience to something you’d like to see us investigate
further—to media@artnet.com with the subject
line “Women’s Place in the Art World.”

The post Artist Adrian Piper Responds to Our Special
‘Women’s Place in the Art World’ Report appeared first on
artnet News.