Guerrilla Girls Body Count: 2019 Year End Artistic Participation Arithmetic

This year's Juried Art  shows numbered 14 from CT, VT, RI, and New York.  All shows whose counts are used here were previously cited in earlier blog posts most of which provided audit trails.

This year's Juried Art Shows accepted the work of 297 male artists and 520 women artists.

For 2019, more than 63% of accepted artists to juried shows in the Northeast were women. 
Last year, 69% of all accepted juried artists were women. 

Four of the fourteen shows, listed the total number of pieces accepted.  In these four shows, the number of women accepted was 107 and the number of men 75 (55% women on average).

In these four shows, 255 pieces were accepted, 149 by women and 106 by men (58% by women on average).

Only two galleries in 2019, featured juried shows that accepted more men than women.

I requested data on the Guilford 2019 Juried Show and received none.

Late update: Real Art Ways Artists Chosen: 5 Women, 1 Man


Interestingly, in 2019, the Connecticut Office of the Arts employs 7 women and 0 men.

In 2019, politically obligatory women gender only shows were routinely scheduled at almost all of the galleries studied.  No such male gender specific gallery shows exist to my knowledge.

The Gerrymandering of Art Museums by Gender

Since the election of Conservative governments in the cultural West, there has been a screaming siren about the politics of Museum art.  Using rudimentary arithmetic, activists have counted the number of pieces of art that belong to major museums and have discovered that men are historically (to date) more highly represented than women.

This lonely, unrepresentative of any context save provincial politics, factoid is sufficient to provoke an aesthetic Sherman's March on the collections of major museums.  Numerology and not historical context, quality, nor even a sense of decency is driving one museum after another to make these numbers match population demographics (gender only of course).

The fact that these collections were largely donated by wealthy collectors and connoisseurs whose cultural ecology was ambiently patriarchal is immaterial.  The cult of Numerology in sexual politics is both profitable, politically satisfying, and culturally toxic.  Museum shows now pander to a mass of contemporary female artists whose claim to recognition starts and often ends with genital equipment however installed.

I recognize that I'm - excuse the expression - pissing into the wind by pointing out that a historically accurate museum should be imbalanced prior to the mid-nineteenth century and be correcting its acquisitions to the degree that they can control gifts from then on.

In 2020, the Baltimore museum will only but women's art.  What's the rush?  Why isn't a healthier balance of acquisition just good business every year?

WE ALL KNOW that this will not be followed by a year dedicated to buying only men's art. After all what sin have today's male artists committed to be flogged for years with womens only shows, economic boycott, and  suicidal worthy neglect?  Are there sociological studies that recommend these kinds of remedies?

And although museum collections are mathematically imbalanced, women dominate juried gallery shows  on the order of 70% women acceptance and 30% male artist acceptance.  I've been doing the arithmetic in this blog and it goes back years.

Gender advocates have been distorting art in Western countries for decades.  They can rewrite history but they cannot undo it without ruthless indifference to inescapable cultural heritage.  Museum walls are being wallpapered over with politically motivated aesthetics rather than artistic merits.  It hurts everyone and turning museums into political battlefields is unacceptable political damage.

Yesterday *this* arrived from the New Britain Museum of American Art:

Shameless pandering.

Whitney Biennial 2019 - A Critique

The Whitney Biennial of 2019 is an institutional and curatorial failure. Four museum floors of it. The effect isn't new but the scale and audacity of exhibition is.  Its managed to weaponize political correctness on an institutional scale.

The show is largely a rarely interrupted, mind-numbing procession of  aesthetic victimization screeds.

As a patron of Fine Art, I found myself groping for something/anything that could quench a thirst for aesthetic satisfaction.  Instead, one installation of woe-is-me-and-mine art after another.  And how could it be any other way.  When shows are curated like a house of cards relying on satisfying the long tail of identity political affiliated groups of patrons, what can we expect but *this*?

The tropes employed by each artist are nothing new. The attempts to shock any sophisticated viewer are unshockingly unsuccessful.  We've seen this all before. So much so that this show may signify many tipping points in the institutional evolutionary calendar.

The first tipping point is that Fine Art in as much as "Art for Art's Sake"  has any contemporary meaning is no longer welcome in museum spaces that are now held hostage to generations of academically programmed curators whose myopic marching orders involve curating shows based on identity politic bingo cards.

The result is that this show represents a regressive transformation of artistic merit for the work that's accepted.  Its *intent* was never "art".   Its intent is politics and its creation is CRAFT.  With few exceptions this biennial promotes cottage industry, political arts and crafts as Fine Art.  It fools no one.  This stuff saturates and intellectually lobotomizes any one who cares about art.

The result is that the exhibition exposes the large body of work as well-made craft.  And it exposes each political interest as being ignorant of the fact each victim, in turn, victimizes all the other neighboring victims - a cacophony of mutual indifference.  Like highway drivers with me first attitudes, these artists - thanks to a curation from hell - desensitize the patron from giving a shit about any of them.

As an artist, I attend shows to inform my own practice.  Where is my work in relation to *this*.  And is there a thinking worth applying to my practice.  I left uninspired and in many cases disheartened.

I'll leave it at that for the moment.  I'm working on a study of the idea of *language* being used to describe art and artworks and a few artists in this exhibition caught my eye because "I don't think it means what you think it means".  But that's better written about as a separate piece.

The Veracity of Guerrilla Girls Arithmetic

In the following essay, some very interesting number crunching calls into question the claims of the Guerilla Girls.

"The research, titled “The Origins of Creativity: The Case of the Arts in the United States since 1850,” was published in February by Karol Jan Borowiecki, a professor of economics at the University of Southern Denmark. Borowiecki, who previously studied careers of famous composers and visual artists as an economic historian, used American census data collected between 1850-2010 to identify trends in social mobility and racial and gender inequality crossed with data on the geographical location and socio-economic background of people in creative fields (visual arts, literature, performing arts, and music). The findings are tested against parallel metrics in the census group of “non-creatives,” meaning people who are not professionally involved in the arts.

The US census data permits the identification of occupations that fall within the creative professions (i.e. artist, musician, author, actor) and provides detailed records on the socio-economic background of each individual, including the geographic location.

Women’s Visibility

With all the professional and societal hindrances in their way, the study interestingly observes that American women’s share in creative occupations —relative to men — has typically been higher than in non-creative fields. That trend starts around 1890 when women’s involvement in creative occupations increases and remains clearly higher than in other fields.

“These results challenge the conventional wisdom that the arts are predominantly a male domain,” Borowiecki told Hyperallergic in a phone interview.

According to the study, females are more likely to engage in a creative occupation than males. Being a woman increases the probability of having a creative occupation by 18% if isolated from other variables (including race, location, and family income.) The highest female presence is among musicians. Authors, visual artists, and actors follow in that order."

Guerrilla Girl Body Count: 2018 Summary

For over six months, I've tracked the metrics on as many juried shows as my feeds expose me to. The data is limited. I don't know how many total men and women submit work . Its important because, artists of both genders *pay* to submit work in the good faith that it will be judged on its artistic merit and nothing else.

I did the arithmetic on 9 juried shows - all that Provide sufficient data - no cherry picking.

In those 9 shows, 69% of the accepted work was by women artists representing 68% of the pieces shown.

432 women

198 men

Six curated shows had similar results. Forty-one women and eighteen men were represented. That is 69% of artists represented were women.

Throughout the year numerous women-only shows were exhibited [presumably because of their under-representation in galleries and museums].

Men had no such shows.

Juried shows included here were exhibited at Guilford; Clinton; Lyme; Stamford Art Assn; Mystic; West Hartford Art League; Bowery Gallery, NYC;  and the New Britain Museum of American Art.