Art+Auction - March 2016_

KRISTINE LARSEN

14

FROMTHEEDITOR

Eric Bryant

Editor in Chief

For all its involvement with avant-gardes

and revolutionary aesthetics, curatorial

practice is a conservative endeavor deeply

bound up in tradition. Art collecting, even

more so. This is perhaps nowhere more

evident than in the art world’s achingly

slow progress in addressing gender

inequality. More than 30 years after the

Guerrilla Girls launched their project

combining biting wit, engaging graphics,

and hard numbers to highlight the issue,

it may seem that no real progress has been made.

The collective’s early assessment that less than

5 percent of works on display at the Metropolitan

Museum were by women was updated last year

by art historian Maura Reilly, who found that

women could claim authorship of just 7 percent

of the permanent collection on display at the

Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Reports from the market are little better. An

analysis of 2015 auction data in the Blouin Art

Sales Index, ranking artists by cumulative value,

included just four women in the top 100: Georgia

O’Keeffe (placing 48th, with nearly $85 million

in sales), Yayoi Kusama (51st, with $84 million),

Joan Mitchell (61st, with $64 million), and

Louise Bourgeois (69th, with $58 million).

Investigations looking beyond the top end of the

market show that works by women account

for less than 10 percent of the pieces even offered

at auction, greatly restricting the opportunity

for any woman’s cumulative numbers to climb.

Yet the news isn’t all bad, and the best hope

for further progress comes from perhaps surpris-

ing quarters. The advances thus far rest largely on

a philosophical shift among art historians, who

have organized numerous shows recently that fore-

ground work by women. Perhaps the most conse-

quential was “elles@centrepompidou” featuring

350 pieces by 150 women in the collection of

the Museé National d’Art Moderne, which held

sway in Paris for 21 months after its debut in

May 2009. The 30th anniversary show at Saatchi

Gallery in London through the 9th of this month,

“Champagne Life,” with 14 women, is but one of

the shows to follow in its wake. Such shows lay

the groundwork for shifts in canonical thinking

that ripple among not only art historians but

also collectors, dealers, and other market players.

Previewed in this issue, “Revolution in the

Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–

2016,” the show inaugurating Hauser Wirth 

& Schimmel’s Los Angeles space this month,

continues reconsideration of the art historical

record, but it is revolutionary in another way. It

is co-curated by Paul Schimmel, who adventur-

ously made the move at the peak of his career

from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los

Angeles, to a partnership at a commercial gallery.

That personal career choice is not as unrelated

to promoting women artists as it may appear. Art

markets may be rooted in tradition and wedded

to conventional thinking, but they also disrupt

those traditions. The pull of the market, opening

new career paths for curators, could well encour-

age new approaches to their areas of study.

Likewise, though I am of two minds about the

increased focus on investment potential among

today’s collectors, this disruptive market trend

bodes well for the long, slow project of exposing

the important contributions of women artists.

There can be no doubt that their work is not

only intellectually underexplored but monetarily

undervalued. Collectors looking for categories

with strong growth potential will ind a wide

range of offerings, if they just dare venture to

break from conventional thinking.

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