Guerrilla Girls posters from 1989, 2005 and 2012.
There seem to be a lot of people in the notes getting defensive over the ratio of women in nude art.
Yes, even if the ratio of nudes between genders was perfectly equal it would still be a massive issue that women artists are so underrepresented. And yes, of course there is nothing inherently immoral or dirty or wrong with nude art.
*However*, that doesn’t mean that we should just ignore that women as nudes are so overrepresented in the art world. If it didn’t matter that women in nude art are so overrepresented, then why would the Guerrilla Girls have even included those percentages in the first place, rather than just making a poster that says “Only 5% / 3% / 4% of artists in the modern art section are women” and leaving it at that?
It does matter that women are so overrepresented as nudes in the art world, otherwise it wouldn’t have been brought up. If you need help understanding why that matters, I think you need to review some feminism 101.
There’s also a few notes insinuating that there is a correlation between the percentage of women artists going down and the percentage of women as nude subjects going down, and I feel like we’re not looking at the same stats.
The percentage of women artists goes down 2% between 1989 and 2005, and so does the percentage of women as nudes. However, between 2005 and 2012 the percentage of female artists goes back up to 4%, and this is where the largest plumet in the percentage of women as nudes happens when it goes down to 76%.
Still overrepresented, but if you think the percentage of women as nudes is only going down due to there being fewer women artists, you are willfully ignoring that the biggest drop in the percentage of women as nudes happens when there was a slight uptick in the amount of women artists.
I don’t think that slight uptick is fully related to the plumet in the percentage of women as nudes, but let’s not cherry pick and pretend excluding women as artists leads to fewer nude paintings of women, when all the statistics indicate the opposite.
My experience, and of course this is purely anecdotal, and probably varies quite a bit between different regions and cultures, but my experience is that I’ve encountered way more people who are prudish about seeing nude men in art than people prudish about nude women in art, and this is often specifically a result of being more desensitized to seeing nude women in art.
