After a couple of months of interviews and trying to wrap my head around the question of why there were no expensive women artists, I read Linda Nochlin's seminal 1972 essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" It was tremendously prescient and helpful; many of the explanations people had given me for why women's art wasn't, in fact, undervalued--or why it shouldn't be selling for more--were identical to the rationales Nochlin laid out--and then demolished--thirty years ago.
When I spoke with Prof. Nochlin, she was much more optimistic, though; from where she sees it, in the art history world--she's a professor at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, and is co-curating an upcoming show of feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum with Maura Reilly--things have improved dramatically since she wrote "WHTBNGWA?" The number women making and showing art have increased; curators and critics and historians are paying them equal (or requisite) attention; and she never hears her current crops of students qualify a work based on the artist's gender, now it's really about the work.
So you've come a long way, baby, I guess.
"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" by Linda Nochlin
