女性，艺术与权力

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  2021-05-07
  What is important is that women face up to the reality of their history and of their present situation, without making excuses or puffing mediocrity. Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse; it is not, however, an intellectual position. Rather, using as a vantage point their situation as underdogs in the realm of grandeur, and outsiders in that of ideology, women can reveal institutional and intellectual weaknesses in general, and, at the same time that they destroy false consciousness, take part in the creation of institutions in which clear thought— and true greatness— are challenges open to anyone, man or woman, courageous enough to take the necessary risk, the leap into the unknown.
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  2021-05-07
  Yet none of them was automatically denied the pleasures of sex or companionship on account of this choice. Nor did they ever conceive that they had sacrificed their manhood or their sexual role on account of their single mindedness in achieving professional fulfillment. But if the artist in question happened to be a woman, one thousand years of guilt, self-doubt, and objecthood would have been added to the undeniable difficulties of being an artist in the modern world.
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  2021-05-07
  Then as now, despite men’s greater “ tolerance,” the choice for women seems always to be marriage or acareer, i.e., solitude as the price of success or sex and companionship at the price of professional renunciation.
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  2021-05-07
  In literature, as in life, even if the woman’s commitment to art was a serious one, she was expected to drop her career and give up this commitment at the behest of love and marriage: this lesson is, today as in the nineteenth century, still inculcated in young girls, directly or indirectly, from the moment they are born.
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  2021-05-07
  Now as in the nineteenth century, amateurism and lack of real commitment as well as snobbery and emphasis on chic on the part of women in their artistic “hobbies, feeds the contempt of the successful, professionally committed man who is engaged in “ real” work and can, with a certain justice, point to his wife’s lack of seriousness in her artistic activities. For such men, the “real” work of women is only that which directly or indirectly serves the family; any other commitment falls under the rubric of diversion, selfishness, egomania, or, at the unspoken extreme, castration. The circle is a vicious one, in which philistinism and frivolity mutually reenforce each other.
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  2021-05-07
  It is this emphasis which transforms serious commitment to frivolous self-indulgence, busy work, or occupational therapy, and today, more than ever, in suburban bastions of the feminine mystique, tends to distort the whole notion of what art is and what kind of social role it plays.
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  2021-05-07
  why there have been no great women artists lies not in the nature of individual genius or the lack of it, but in the nature of given social institutions and what they forbid or encourage in various classes or groups of individuals. ............Indeed, it was argued by defenders of traditional painting in the nineteenth century that there could be no great painting with clothed figures, since costume inevitably destroyed both the temporal universality and the classical idealization required by great art.
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  2021-05-07
  As John Stuart Mill pointed out more than a century ago: “Everything which is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural.”Most men, despite lip service to equality, are reluctant to give up this “ natural” order of things in which their advantages are so great; for women, the case is further complicated by the fact that, as Mill astutely pointed out, unlike other oppressed groups or castes, men demand of them not only submission but unqualified affection as well; thus women are often weakened by the internalized demands of the male-dominated society itself, as well as by a plethora of material goods and comforts: the middle class woman has a great deal more to lose than her chains.
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  2021-05-07
  It is when one really starts thinking about the implications of “ Why have there been no great women artists?” that one begins to realize to what extent our consciousness of how things are in the world has been conditioned—and often falsified—by the way the most important questions are posed. We tend to take it for granted that there really is an East Asian Problem, a Poverty Problem, a Black Problem— and a Woman Problem. But first we must ask ourselves who is formulating these “questions,” and then, what purposes such formulations may serve. (We may, of course, refresh our memories with the connotations of the Nazis’ “Jewish Problem.”) Indeed, in our time of instant communication, “problems”are rapidly formulated to rationalize the bad conscience of those with power: thus the problem pose...
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  2021-05-07
  But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education—education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals. The miracle is, in fact, that given the overwhelming odds against women, or blacks, that so many of both have managed to achieve so much sheer excellence, in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogative like science, polit...
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  2021-05-07
  The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been. That this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation; nor will accusations of male-chauvinist distortion of history. There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were lar...
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  2021-05-07
  ..........But they do nothing to question the assumptions lying behind the question “ Why have there been no great women artists?” On the contrary, by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications.Another attempt to answer the question involves shifting the ground slightly and asserting, as some contemporary feminists do, that there is a different kind of “greatness” for women’s art than for men’s, thereby postulating the existence of a distinctive and recognizable feminine style, different both in its formal and its expressive qualities and based on the special character of women’s situation and experience.
• 长安

  2019-07-03
  作为一个女人——就像作为一个美国人或一个侏儒或出生于1900年而非1940年一样——可以是艺术作品创作时的一项变量，甚至是一项重要变量，但是这个基本因素无从提供什么预期。某个艺术家是女性，是她选择某个风格或题材的必要条件，而非充分条件，除了性别之外，她还有很多其他的条件元素，诸如她的国籍，年龄，专业训练，气质，对现有表现形式的反应，或者她自我认同的优先次序等等。
• 小群子

  2012-02-09
  “出卖自己”和“堕落”一样是个有性别差异的语汇：对一个男人而言，出卖自己变得意思不是做性交易赚钱——如女人的情况一般，而是为了金钱违背自己的艺术，出卖自己的才华，简单说，就是"出卖“——这种命运对男性而言比死还糟糕，尤其对艺术家来说更是如此。