For this assignment, I read an article and answered some questions. The article has been pasted below the response paragraph.
This article is about the differences in pay and opportunity between men and women in the art industry. It primarily involves women who are or were artists as it looks at the inequality and injustice endured by women in the art world. It also involves male artists as the art industry overall was nearly completely controlled by men until recently. If I’m being honest, I chose this article because it was the first one that came up. With so much homework due, I don’t have time to do extensive research on which article to choose. This article relates to the short story in multiple ways. First, both the article and the story revolve around sexism and inequity. Secondly, they’re also both about changes in tradition and oppression. In the short story, the water carrying task was changed from a completely male demographic to an equal share of both boys and girls. While the subject of change was the same in the article, it’s also talked about that while progress has been made, there is still change needed in the world. Finally, they both take a look back a what it was like for women in the past. In conclusion, we’re still a long way from the ideal circumstances and change is still needed.
Why Is Work by Female Artists Still Valued Less Than Work by Male Artists?
Theories for a gender wage gap
Supply-side mechanisms and the social construction of gender
Turning this supply-side perspective to the art world, the argument seems at first less robust. Women, as noted elsewhere in the Art Market 2019 report, major in the arts at higher proportions than men. An analogy can be drawn to job characteristics, however, and articulates as follows: part of why female artists earn less than men is that they produce art with different characteristics, be that in medium, size, style, or subject matter. This does not imply that any differences are a result of biology. Unsubstantiated and misdirected claims about the innate abilities and preferences of women and men, such as
founder
’s claim that women do not think well in three dimensions, have little validity in light of the cultural forces that strongly pattern people’s lives according to their gender.
An example of artistic difference resulting from cultural gender norms is seen in the fact that there are more textile works by female than male artists in the
market. Men are not unskilled or incapable of weaving, but one need not point to biology in any effort to explain why it is more common to see women producing textiles. In more explicitly sexist eras of art history, the textile arts were a medium that women were permitted and encouraged to adopt. One of Gropius’s conclusions regarding his belief that women worked best in two dimensions was that they should weave instead of study architecture or design. Not all women adhered to this injunction, but the copious amount of textiles produced by women in the Bauhaus era can largely be explained by it. The increasingly valued collections of Bauhaus textiles produced by artists such as
, Benita Koch-Otte, and
, along with the traditions of female weavers across millennia and cultures, provide a lineage and language that burgeoning female artists may be more likely to pride themselves on as they envision their own work. This is an empirical question that could be asked to explain why textiles are more commonly produced by female artists, even today.