Since The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA) showed up to be the most dismally lopsided of equal opportunity exhibition spaces in our survey Balancing the Books, the CoUNTesses @ blogspot.com have decided to investigate further, turning our counting markers to the gallery's publicly funded magazine BROADSHEET. Like its main gallery representation, the magazine was similarly embarrassing for CACSA on the gender equality front.
CoUNTess picked up the current issue Broadsheet / September 2008 / Volume 37.3, with a view to investigate how much coverage is given to male artists vs female artists. The most direct method was to simply count the names of every artist discussed and referenced in the text (Individual artists were only counted once in each article. Curators, directors, writers and musicians were not counted).
The shameful result... Male artists receive 178 mentions, female artists...43. Ouch. But seeing as the Australian members of the Advisory Board total 8 males, 0 females, perhaps not too surprising. Broadsheet, you have been counted! Below is a breakdown of our Broadsheet findings.
Editor
Male 1
Advisory Board (International and Australian)
Male 16
Female 4
Advisory Board (Australian only)
Male 8
Female 0
Contributors to Broadsheet Volume 37.3
Male 10
Female 5
Content
Male artists 178 mentions
Female artists 43 mentions
Cover image*
Male 1
Female 1
* artist collaborators
9 comments:
i think these numbers are interesting and certainly they support teh feeling I get looking around- however i think its a really small sample. What is the result over a year? or 5 years?
Just browsing through some back issues of BS these numbers seem realistic
I think this countesses project is interesting because it makes those "feeling" into "fact" through doing the numbers. Perhaps you could post your findings of the last couple of issues here ? Rigor is better than conjecture
There are a lot galleries run by women and shows curated by women and writing done by women. Often those activities focus on as many or more male artists as female.
Do the directors, writers and curators feel that if they focus on too many women artists that they will be ignored, that eventually there will be less hype around their efforts than if they focus on male artists?
Perhaps maybe the male artist’s work is just better. I suspect that anyone on the administrative side of the art world thinks that the best and safest road to success is to follow the work of male artists.
Thanks Countess for putting this out there
what is not surprising? that with no women on the advisory board that men on the advisory board would naturally be more interested in male artists? and should women join the board we would see more women artists included?
when male editors, writers, curators, directors start taking women artists seriously is when the real change will occur
Broadsheet is pretentious and crappy. Countesses, you should examine the statistics of pretentiousness in art press: start with Realtime! No wonder it's free, who'd buy such drivel.
What constitues a "mention"? Are you looking at how long [column inches] that mention is? And how does the "mention" compare to a featured discussion, or the relative "mention"? You can prove anything with numbers.
Hang on countess, even your own e-mail address list consists of more men than women...by my count, there are 190 men, 184 women and 107 neutral...how far do you really want to take this?
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