Frau-Sein verkauft sich gut – Überlegungen und Thesen zu Kunst, Karriere, Geschlecht und Vermarktung

Abstract

Being a Woman Sells – Thoughts and Theses on Art, Careers, Gender, and Marketing

In recent years, art by women artists has received ambivalent recognition. Whereas on the one hand the sheer number of publications, exhibitions, and well-known women artists has increased considerably, the general discourse on women in the arts and culture has often been accompanied by a weird sort of feminist conservatism. The text analyses the structure of these ambivalent and sometimes even contradictory phenomena by means of selected but interwoven examples. The main thesis claims that feminism functions as a label under which different layers of the debate – popular, political or/and specialist voices – are closely intertwined, and that art historical narratives in particular don’t sufficiently consider the consequences of these entanglements. As a result, feminist art history often reproduces an unreflected and by now obsolete notion of feminism.