Karen Kilimnik: So much better than Elizabeth Peyton it's not even funny
Here are some quotes from a silly New York Times article today about the disparity in auction prices between male and female artists (thanks again, Bill):One more example. Since three emerging figurative painters - Luc Tuymans of Belgium and the Americans John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton - were exhibited together at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997, they, too, have come to seem almost like classmates, all heralded as leading figures in painting's contemporary resurgence. [What resurgence? Painting left the art market for about two years in the mid-70s, it hasn't gone away since.] The two men's canvases have sold for more than $1 million. Meanwhile, Ms. Peyton's 1996 oil portrait of a languorous John Lennon is estimated by Christie's at $200,000 to $300,000. And even that is a lot more than the current record price for her work: $136,000, set in June 2002. This is great news. Perhaps there is a (benign, de-gendered) God, after all. Peyton's work is tepid and blandly illustrational: rather than languorous the paintings would be better described as fey, or wan, and that's all she does, fey and wan, over and over and over. Stupid looking people all with the same cherry red lips--how about some other colors for those? Karen Kilimnik's good bad paintings ca. 1997 would have been a better choice for that particular (overrated) MOMA show.
Art defies head-on comparison. Forget apples and oranges; how does one judge the value of [Rachel] Whiteread's cast fiberglass and rubber mattress relative to Mr. Hirst's deteriorating shark? Or of Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture of a taxidermied ostrich compared with [Agnes] Martin's canvas with the faintest of graphite grids on it? The contemporary art market has at least one frustratingly simple answer: price. And from that perspective, the comparison is unmistakable: art made by women is regarded less highly than art made by men. This argument is tautological: the art world chooses men over women in the competition for higher prices; choices can't be easily made; the only criteria for choosing is price. Art doesn't actually "defy comparison," people do it all the time, and usually not as ludicrously as above. You compare artist to artist, rather than arbitrarily chosen artwork to arbitrarily chosen artwork.
In all of the following comparisons (originally posed in the article), the former artist is protean, energetic, and innovative and the latter is refined, narrow-ranged, building on and deepening existing ideas, and sorry, we tend to value one more than the other: Philip Guston vs Joan Mitchell, Damien Hirst vs Rachel Whiteread, and (if you must compare these two) Mauricio Catellan vs Agnes Martin. Guerrilla Girl repellent: "Women can make art as well as men can. Many of the artists mentioned in the article are undervalued and the market will eventually correct for that, but on the basis of scholarship and consensus, not nitwitty New York Times articles that refuse to make meaningful comparisons."
Hey, every time art is compared and valued on a basis other than just price, an angel gets its wings.
You say that price-based comparisons aren't "meaningful"? Then we totally agree. Like it or not, in the art world, or the art market [sic], price is used regularly as a proxy for quality, talent, significance, and meaning. It's true in the overheated market today, but artists and curators and critics have regularly decried this "economic curation" in the past, too. Is the NYT implicated in this because it's run three major art auction stories in the last week? Sure. But let he who is without sin in the sales&price-gossiping art world cast the first stone.
One point of the article was to point out the difficulties and discrepancies of price-based comparisons, comparisons which often DON'T make sense on other criteria. But it was also to point out the systemic bias of the price=value judgment: art by women still sells for less.
And there's nothing prescriptive in the article, really, And "the market" is already "correcting" for these discrepancies to some extent. But that's only after decades of effort rooting out sexism in the "scholarship and consensus" you trust. You know, the kind of loaded critical language that calls a man's work "protean" and "energetic" and "innovative" while a woman's is "wan," "refined" and "building on existing ideas".
There are scads of female artists whose work I'd describe with the "male" adjectives you list, and vice versa. I was trying to stick to your comparisons. I tried to head this off, but oh well...
For those reading this thread who might be wondering, Greg Allen of greg.org wrote the Times article in question. Thanks for replying, Greg, I feel like we're quite far apart on a number of issues. I try to stay sane by not following the market, prices, etc too closely and yeah, I do trust scholarship if that means comparing careers, where an artist fits in history, etc.
all your problems have been solved! In spite of its success, we were not completely satisfied with the system of listing artists alphabetically. We were sure that there were other, even more effective, ways to order artists and their exhibitions. We asked ourselves if it would be possible to predict an artist's career using econometrical methods. From then on there was no stopping us.
We became absorbed with the idea of ordering artists, exhibitions and venues differently, other than the simple alphabetical form. Over the months our thoughts ripened, culminating in weeks spent programming the first version of the Artist Ranking. The Artist Ranking orders artists in an ordinal scaling according to their recognition in the eyes of professionals (i.e. curators, gallery owners).
Thanks, I'm glad to see technology being applied to this difficult issue of evaluating artists.
i think timothy greenfield-sanders put the short ones in the front and tall ones in the back.
awesome, now my term "out-arted" can have fact-based resolution.
"the paintings would be better described as fey, or wan, and that's all she does, fey and wan, over and over and over. Stupid looking people all with the same cherry red lips" yeah and red lip are really out, but I guess that put the edge to it.
So spot on about Peyton: god-awful lazy stuff in poor perspective all with the same hipster hair and pasty complexions and all centered on the canvas: a lolling parade of Rufus Wainright twig boys.
Thanks, Cat. This post was written a while before Fey-and-Wan had her NewMu retrospective: I guess that museum was reading Greg.org.
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Karen Kilimnik: So much better than Elizabeth Peyton it's not even funny
Here are some quotes from a silly New York Times article today about the disparity in auction prices between male and female artists (thanks again, Bill):This is great news. Perhaps there is a (benign, de-gendered) God, after all. Peyton's work is tepid and blandly illustrational: rather than languorous the paintings would be better described as fey, or wan, and that's all she does, fey and wan, over and over and over. Stupid looking people all with the same cherry red lips--how about some other colors for those? Karen Kilimnik's good bad paintings ca. 1997 would have been a better choice for that particular (overrated) MOMA show. This argument is tautological: the art world chooses men over women in the competition for higher prices; choices can't be easily made; the only criteria for choosing is price. Art doesn't actually "defy comparison," people do it all the time, and usually not as ludicrously as above. You compare artist to artist, rather than arbitrarily chosen artwork to arbitrarily chosen artwork.
In all of the following comparisons (originally posed in the article), the former artist is protean, energetic, and innovative and the latter is refined, narrow-ranged, building on and deepening existing ideas, and sorry, we tend to value one more than the other: Philip Guston vs Joan Mitchell, Damien Hirst vs Rachel Whiteread, and (if you must compare these two) Mauricio Catellan vs Agnes Martin. Guerrilla Girl repellent: "Women can make art as well as men can. Many of the artists mentioned in the article are undervalued and the market will eventually correct for that, but on the basis of scholarship and consensus, not nitwitty New York Times articles that refuse to make meaningful comparisons."
- tom moody 5-02-2005 8:57 pm
Hey, every time art is compared and valued on a basis other than just price, an angel gets its wings.
You say that price-based comparisons aren't "meaningful"? Then we totally agree. Like it or not, in the art world, or the art market [sic], price is used regularly as a proxy for quality, talent, significance, and meaning. It's true in the overheated market today, but artists and curators and critics have regularly decried this "economic curation" in the past, too. Is the NYT implicated in this because it's run three major art auction stories in the last week? Sure. But let he who is without sin in the sales&price-gossiping art world cast the first stone.
One point of the article was to point out the difficulties and discrepancies of price-based comparisons, comparisons which often DON'T make sense on other criteria. But it was also to point out the systemic bias of the price=value judgment: art by women still sells for less.
And there's nothing prescriptive in the article, really, And "the market" is already "correcting" for these discrepancies to some extent. But that's only after decades of effort rooting out sexism in the "scholarship and consensus" you trust. You know, the kind of loaded critical language that calls a man's work "protean" and "energetic" and "innovative" while a woman's is "wan," "refined" and "building on existing ideas".
- greg.org (guest) 5-03-2005 7:18 pm
There are scads of female artists whose work I'd describe with the "male" adjectives you list, and vice versa. I was trying to stick to your comparisons. I tried to head this off, but oh well...
- tom moody 5-03-2005 7:53 pm
For those reading this thread who might be wondering, Greg Allen of greg.org wrote the Times article in question. Thanks for replying, Greg, I feel like we're quite far apart on a number of issues. I try to stay sane by not following the market, prices, etc too closely and yeah, I do trust scholarship if that means comparing careers, where an artist fits in history, etc.
- tom moody 5-03-2005 8:23 pm
all your problems have been solved!
- dave 5-03-2005 9:42 pm
Thanks, I'm glad to see technology being applied to this difficult issue of evaluating artists.
- tom moody 5-03-2005 10:25 pm
i think timothy greenfield-sanders put the short ones in the front and tall ones in the back.
- bill 5-03-2005 10:40 pm
awesome, now my term "out-arted" can have fact-based resolution.
- paul (guest) 5-04-2005 12:43 am
"the paintings would be better described as fey, or wan, and that's all she does, fey and wan, over and over and over. Stupid looking people all with the same cherry red lips" yeah and red lip are really out, but I guess that put the edge to it.
- Brent Hallard (guest) 5-04-2005 1:20 pm
So spot on about Peyton: god-awful lazy stuff in poor perspective all with the same hipster hair and pasty complexions and all centered on the canvas: a lolling parade of Rufus Wainright twig boys.
- Cat Weaver (guest) 12-27-2010 5:20 pm
Thanks, Cat. This post was written a while before Fey-and-Wan had her NewMu retrospective: I guess that museum was reading Greg.org.
- tom moody 12-27-2010 5:55 pm