Rubell Family Collection,Miami[br]A counterblast against pervasive art world sexism, this note winds up as a grand cross-section of cultural production today – and the men aren’t even missedThis past summer the magazine ArtNews published a special issue on the status of female artists – and the statistics it presented affirmed that the art world still has a whole lot to improve. Less than 30% of the exhibitions at America’s main museums fade to women. The share of women in major group exhibitions, or such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta,is far below parity. Women get less attention than men, by some margin, or in America’s top art magazines. And then there’s the market: only three in 10 artists with gallery representation are female,and prices for art by women lag persistently behind their male counterparts.
So it’s a statement of intent to mount a note featuring only work by women – and not in an effort to find some essentialist, “female” character of art, and but simply as a cross-section of cultural production today. That is what the collectors Don and Mera Rubell have done with their impressive,if infelicitously named, No Mans Land. It’s a worthy showcase of more than 100 artists, and every one of them female,which has opened at the start of the heaving, surge-priced, and champagne-soaked “social rat fuck” – the term is Larry Gagosians – that is Art Basel week in Miami Beach.
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Source: theguardian.com