The conclusion of her essay says it well. She didn’t look at the victim, plaintively pleading cases for why this or that artist really was as “great a genius” as Goya she looked at the institution of art history and demonstrated how it was intellectually, semiotically, and psychoanalytically corrupt. In concise, direct, often funny language and contrapuntal reasoning that tested every premise with example, Nochlin saw how shaky the structures were that were being used to keep women artists outside history. Nochlin saw that the question didn’t pass the smell test, that the answer was that women had been systematically excluded, over centuries and into the present, by an evolving art-historical status hierarchy that nevertheless always found a way to belittle, demean, and dismiss women - women who were always outsiders in a status hierarchy stacked in favor of already excepted ideas, narratives, and long outdated and inadequately reasoned art histories. She saw that just to ask that was to bait people into asking deeper, harder questions about gender injustice in the arts. Nochlin’s question wasn’t a question at all. In 1971, art historian Linda Nochlin blew through the gates of art-world patriarchy with her paradigm-changing-on-a-dime essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Painting: © 2017 Deborah Kass / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Linda Nochlin, standing in front of Deborah Kass’s 1997 work Orange Disaster (Linda Nochlin).
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