In the National Gallery of Australia only 25 percent of the Australian art collection is work by women. This is far better than the international standard, where roughly 90 percent of all artworks exhibited in major collections are by men. The most expensive painting by a female artist — Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 — does not even rank among the 100 most expensive paintings ever sold.

Why is women’s art valued so much less than art by men? Some economists have suggested the greater burden of child rearing and other domestic duties means women have had fewer opportunities to succeed in the art world. Others have blamed the ‘quality’ of women’s art. In 2013, German painter Georg Baselitz said, “Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact. The market doesn’t lie.”

We wanted to know: is work by women generally valued differently to work by men because it is of a lower artistic quality, or is it just discrimination?

In the art world, there is a gaping gender imbalance when it comes to male and female artists. A group of researchers have explored why

Which painting do you like better?

We showed average Americans pairs of paintings, painted between 1625 and 1979, side by side. Each of the pairs were similar in style, motif and period, but one work was by a male artist and the other by a female artist. The participants were in two groups. One group saw the artists’ names and the other didn’t.

We were pleasantly surprised to find our participants did not give a hoot about the artist’s gender. In both groups, 54 percent preferred the painting done by a woman.

Which painting do you think is worth more?

Next, we wanted to find out if people picked male paintings for reasons other than personal taste. Art isn’t just bought and sold on aesthetic value. It is a speculative market, where art is treated as an investment.

Gender discrimination emerged in both these experiments. When asked to predict the value of and creator fame of paintings, people suddenly swung towards picking male artists. Preference for female paintings fell by 10 percent and 9 percent in these two new experiments. Gender discrimination in art comes not from personal aesthetic preference — Baselitz’s argument that women “don’t paint very well” — but people thinking paintings are more valuable and famous when painted by male artists.

A question of fame

In our fifth experiment, everyone saw the names of the artists. But only one group was told which of the two artists was objectively more famous — the male artist in 90 percent of cases. The group with that information was 14 percent more likely to pick male paintings.

Here, discrimination only occurred when our participants were asked to assign a monetary value to the art works, or when they were given information about the level of fame of the painter. This means our art appreciators discriminated not on gender, but on something closely associated with gender: fame.

And because male artists have, historically, been given more opportunities to become artists — and therefore become famous — artwork by men is perceived as having a higher value. Discrimination in the arts exists, but it often comes from people’s beliefs about what others care to discriminate about. The task ahead is to change perceptions of people and institutions who do not discriminate — but merely conform to others’ discrimination.

Robert Hoffmann is a professor of Economics and Bronwyn Coate is a senior lecturer of Economics at RMIT University, Australia.
Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 12th, 2023