white men rule the [art] world

A must read.

fugue

“Any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.”
― Andrea Dworkin

In my last post I wrote a little about the art establishment and how it is controlled by white men. A reader of the post asked me if I thought anything at all had changed. I said not. This is why.

While you have images like these being displayed in top art galleries and published in fine art books, then how can anything have changed?

Richard Kern is a middle-aged, white man who was born, lives and works in the USA.  He is variously described as an underground artist, a filmmaker, a photographer. Never as a pornographer. He is an artist. Kern’s work is feted in art circles, where his images of women are critiqued for their artistic merit.  The art establishment facilitates his ‘work’ and he is now…

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Just because it’s art doesn’t mean it isn’t racist sexist objectification of women

Karen Ingala Smith

Bjarne Melgaard who as described by art critic Roberta Smith,  “never met a taboo he didn’t like breaking,” has a reputation to maintain as an aging enfant terrible .  He has produced a ‘chair-as-art’  based on a similar one created in the 1960s by Allen Jones. The chair is a woman on her back with her thighs pulled up to her chest and her calves and feet sticking up in the air.  The backs of her thighs make the seat.  She is wearing black knickers, long gloves and boots.  The difference is that Melgaard’s chair is a made to resemble a black woman and Jones’ is white.

Russian fashion designer and the editor-in-chief of new bi-annual art and fashion magazine GARAGE, Dasha Zhukova (note – it really isn’t acceptable to reduce a woman to that of girlfriend of a man, however rich and famous he happens to be) is a white…

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