为什么男性艺术家的画作比女性的贵10倍？

GENDER PAY GAP

 为什么男性艺术家的画作 

 比女性的贵10倍？

 全文字数：2849字 / 阅读时间：9分钟 

Are men 10 times better at painting than women? German artist Georg Baselitz said ,“women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact. The market doesn’t lie.”

The market may not be deliberately deceiving us but it certainly gives the impression that male artists are much better than female ones. The most expensive painting ever sold – Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci – fetched $450m while the world record for a female artist, Georgia O’Keeffe, is just $44.4m, a tenth as much.

Of course, this is an unfair comparison. For most of human history, women were not allowed to practise art in the same way as men. But even among living artists, Jeff Koons holds the record, at $91m, while the female record held by Jenny Saville is just $12.5m.

And lower down the chain, a 10:1 disparity still holds. Helen Gorrill, the author of Women Can’t Paint, has studied the prices of 5,000 paintings sold all over the world and found that for every £1 fetched by a male artist’s work, one by a woman gets a mere 10p – and its value plummets further if she signs it.

It really is shocking. For some time, women have made up 70% of students in art college, selected on merit, and the art world prides itself on its liberal, progressive values. Yet it presides over a great pay gap.

Could it be that men are simply better artists? Oxford professor of finance Renée Adams decided to put the idea to the test. She showed participants five paintings by men and five by women and asked them to identify the gender of the artist. They guessed right 50% of the time – no better than tossing a coin. This is pretty good evidence that art by men is no different from, and thus no better than, art by women.

Then she showed a sample of affluent men who visit galleries – the classic profile of an art collector – a painting created by AI, and randomly assigned it either a male or female artist’s name. If the collectors were told it was painted by a man they said they liked it more.

How have we got here? Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, says: “Women artists have fared very poorly because there’s been an unconscious collusion between the marketplace, art history and the institutions. Everybody lacks confidence, everybody’s looking for confirmation. So there’s been a sort of confirmational history. And, of course, convention and history were framed by patriarchy.”

You only have to look at EH Gombrich’s The Story of Art, still the bestselling art book in the world, assigned to art students everywhere. It mentions just one female artist in its 688 pages. And you only have to look at museum collections to see how disproportionately male they still are.

Meanwhile, some female artists have been dropped by galleries as soon as they announced they were pregnant. They were told that people would no longer take their work seriously; that buying their work was too much of a risk because they wouldn’t be as committed to their careers.

So female artists are really up against it. The good news is that the world is slowly starting to change.

Museums are trying to rebalance their collections. Auction houses are now pushing female artists. 

Last week Veronica Ryan was announced as winner of the Turner prize from an all-female and non-binary shortlist. And the Venice Biennale was hugely weighted towards women this year.

Collectors are noticing too. Even though prices for work by female artists are starting from a far lower base, they are currently rising 29% faster than for art by men. For canny investors who want a bargain and a higher return, it’s a no-brainer.

Despite the popular belief that the artworld has become more inclusive, art writers Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin found that much apparent progress was superficial. Museum acquisition of work by female artists peaked over a decade ago, then declined.

Figures released last week by Freelands Foundation shows that Women and non-binary artists accounted for 32% of the works acquired for Tate’s collection in 2021: a small improvement that does little to address the historic gender balance. The National Gallery acquired four works in 2021, all by men.

“If these were the figures for male artists, they’d be viewed as a crisis,” they say. “Overall, the data shows a systemic apathy, especially among museums. The art market has seen a marked improvement for works by women in recent years, but they remain so deeply undervalued it will take generations to catch up.”

For Burns and Halperin, celebratory articles compound the problem: “They’re selling a tempting version of reality, encouraging readers to believe in progress that simply does not exist… Most media coverage of progress in the art world is based on emotions instead of data. The bottom line is that the art world considers itself more progressive than it is.”

Art historian Eliza Goodpasture argues that it takes more than unfettered enthusiasm to secure a place in the canon. “Continuing to group ‘women artists’ together as this category distinct from ‘artists’, isn’t as progressive as it may seem,” she says.

Equality is not just box-ticking. Pushing for diversity in our collections and exhibitions matters because art is an expression of human thought and experience. An art world that remains biased not only fails to reflect the richness of society – it eloquently expresses whose ideas and feelings that society values.