Men's paintings cost 10 times more than a work by a woman artist, but why? Are men 10 times better artists than women? The art market gives the impression that male artists are much better than female artists. The most expensive painting - Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi - sold for $450 million, while the world record for a female artist, Georgia O'Keeffe, is just $44.4 million, a tenth more.
Of course, this is an unfair comparison. For most of human history, women were not allowed to freely practice art like men, so there are inevitably fewer female artists. However, even among living artists, Jeff Koons holds the record, at $91 million, while Jenny Saville's female record is only $12.5 million. Even among contemporary artists, the 10:1 disparity still holds. Helen Gorrill, author of Women Can't Paint, studied the prices of 5,000 paintings sold around the world and found that for every £1 a male artist earns for his work, a woman earns just 10 cents. The author noted in a BBC Radio 4 documentary: "It's the most shocking difference in gender value I've ever encountered in any industry."
This is shocking to think about, as women made up 70% of art college students, and supposedly, the art world prides itself on liberal and progressive values. However, presides over this wage gap. Author Helen Gorrill found that the value of a work by a man increases if it is signed, while the value of a work by a woman decreases if it is signed. Are men simply better artists? Oxford finance professor Renée Adams decided to test the idea. He showed participants five paintings by men and five by women and asked them to identify the artist's gender. They got it right 50% of the time – nothing beats the coin toss game. This is good evidence that men's art is no different and therefore no better than women's art.It then showed a sample of rich men visiting galleries – the classic profile of an art collector – an AI-created painting and randomly assigned the name of a male or female artist. If collectors were told it was painted by a man, they claimed they liked it more than the pieces painted by a woman. As Renée Adams declared: “Same artist, same painting”.
How did we get here? Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, said: “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, which you could call the canon. And, of course, convention and history were framed by patriarchy.”
The reality is that the world's best-selling art book aimed at art students everywhere, EH Gombrich's The Story of Art, mentions only one female artist in 688 pages. Where is Artemisia Gentileschi? Or Frida Kahlo? Or O'Keeffe? Museum collections also demonstrate how disproportionate the presence of men and women is. When an artist's work is purchased by a museum, the value of his work increases.Meanwhile, some female artists were abandoned by their galleries as soon as they announced they were pregnant. They were told that people would no longer take their work seriously and that buying their work would be too risky. The good news is that the world is slowly changing.
Museums have begun to rebalance their collections, with some even selling off men's art to buy more women's art. Auction houses are now pushing female artists forward, and the Venice Biennale weighed heavily on women this year. Collectors are also gaining a new awareness. While prices for work by female artists are starting off at a much lower base, they are currently rising 29% faster than men's. For astute investors who want to pay less and get a higher return, it's the best deal.Besides, whether female or male, it's art. As Bellatrix Hubert, from the David Zwirner gallery in New York, points out: “If I'm looking at the artists we're most interested in right now, it is predominantly women that are making the best art. Or the art that I think is more interesting.”
Do women not know how to paint? Lie. Even the current market already says so.
