Tag: Laura Gascoigne

Laura Gascoigne

In April Lionel Messi put a signed pair of his adidas football boots up for auction at Christie’s. Customised with the names of his wife and sons, they were the ‘game-worn’ boots in which the Barcelona striker scored his 644th goal for his club, beating Pele’s previous record of 643 for Santos. Perfumed with the player’s DNA, they raised $175,000 for a hospital charity.

That’s a lot of cash for a pair of smelly old boots, but you can just about see how a stinking rich football fetishist might want to splash it to get close to his hero. (I’m assuming it was a he.) It’s less easy to understand how a range of digital footwear designed by 18-year-old ‘crypto-artist’ Fewocious for a virtual shoe brand, RTFKT studios, sold out in seven minutes at the end of February for £2.2 million. 

What did their purchasers actually buy? A ‘non-fungible token’ or ‘NFT’ asserting their rights to flaunt the virtual merch on their online avatars’ feet: basically, bragging rights. So central have bragging rights become to existence in the online metaverse that they command eye-watering sums in cryptocurrencies. A non-fungible Mars House designed by Krista Kim sold for the equivalent of $512,000 in March. You couldn’t live in it but you could show people around: it was the definition of a show home. 

Lost already? Bear with me. My 2002 edition of the OED – an actual book – defines the term ‘fungible’ as “precisely or acceptably replacing or replaceable by another item” in law. ‘Non-fungible’ is a more recent coinage designed to sneak the idea of private ownership into a public network – the Internet – originally founded on the utopian principle of being free and open. A non-fungible token, as defined by Wikipedia, is “a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable”.

For digital artists whose uploaded images could previously be viewed by millions without earning them a crypto-bean, the concept is a game-changer. In February an NFT for a 10-year-old cartoon meme, Nyan Cat, viewed over 180 million times for free on YouTube, earned its creator Chris Torres $590,000 in an online auction on a digital art platform, Foundation, launched just two weeks earlier. Naturally, traditional auctioneers were slavering for a slice of the action. In March Christie’s New York sold its first NFT, Everydays – The First 5000 Days, for $69.3 million. Touted as “one of the most unique bodies of work to emerge in the history of digital art”, it gave the buyer a lot of bang for his crypto-buck, representing the entire life’s work of American graphic designer and animator Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple. 

Winklemann has been a busy little Beeple: between 1 May 2007 and 7 January 2021 he drew and posted a digital artwork a day for his two million Instagram followers, and Everydays is a collage of all 5,000. Don’t underestimate Beeple, he’s a talented guy: sharp, proficient and unbelievably fast. His satirical squib Mike Pence: Lord of the Flies appeared within hours of the vice-presidential debate of October 7th, 2020. Everydays is undoubtedly a tour de force, though whether it’s a chef d’oeuvre is another matter. Like Banksy Beeple is simply an illustrator with a gift for visual satire, yet his Christie’s sale price now places him third in the most expensive living artist rankings behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney.

Hockney has dismissed Beeple’s drawings as “silly little things” and claimed that NFTs are for “ICSs – International Crooks and Swindlers”, but Christie’s have no problem with ICSs. “He showed us this collage,” said Head of Digital Sales Noah Davis, “and that was my eureka moment when I knew this was going to be extremely important”. For “extremely important” read “immensely profitable”, as the sale has opened up a whole new market of wealthy crypto-geeks who would never normally enter a physical gallery but have bags of funny money burning holes in their virtual pockets.

Christie’s announced that it would accept payment in the relatively new cryptocurrency Ethereum and, as it happened, the winning bidder – who used the pseudonym Metakovan – was later unmasked as Vignesh Sundaresan, owner of Metapurse, an NFT index fund that in 2017 raised $47.5 million on an initial Ethereum coin offering for which the tokens are now worth crypto-zilch. Small world. Like other speculators using the Ethereum platform to sell unregulated securities, metapump-and-dump impresario Sundaresan had found himself on the sharp end of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. So imagine his delight on discovering an unregulated market in which he can operate with impunity: art. The multimillions he splashed on Everydays were a small investment to secure the endorsement of Ethereum by Christie’s. As the art historian Tina Rivers Ryan told Apollo: “Art is being instrumentalised to inflate the value of a particular technology just as much, and perhaps more, than the other way round.” Or as the mafia puts it: “One hand washes the other”.

The question is, are there enough rich crypto-geeks in the world to support this market? Two aspiring young international crooks and swindlers, Joe Kennedy and Jonny Burt of Unit London, are betting on it with the launch in September of what they claim will be “the first art world-led platform for NFTs”, Institut. Like Davis, they’ve spied an opening for a quick crypto-buck. Why sell pictures when you can sell pixels? With the market growing 800% in the first four months of this year, faster even than Covid, they predict that “NFTs are primed to be the leading emerging asset class for the new virtual economy… The future for artists, and the art market, has never been more exciting”. Yes, if you like flying through the ether by the seat of your pants. 

A major problem with NFTs for the eco-conscious is that their ‘proof-of-work’ calculations involve banks of processors guzzling energy like there’s no tomorrow to achieve a result formerly secured at the stroke of a pen. In July, when Damien Hirst inevitably entered the fray, he announced that his tokens would be launched on a new environmentally friendly ecosystem called Palm, connected to Ethereum but allegedly 99% more energy-efficient. Just as well, as there are 10,000 of them; Hirst has never done things by halves. Priced at $2,000 a pop, his mini-spot painting NFTs form part of The Currency, a project designed to challenge “the concept of value through money and art”, with a twist in its tail. Collectors will be given the option, before a year is out, of trading in their NFT for the original painting in enamel on handmade paper. If they keep the virtual version, the original will be destroyed. “Anyone who buys The Currency will participate in this work,” prospective buyers have been assured. “It’s not just about owning it.”

My money’s on the originals winning out, though there’s no accounting for the tastes of techno-geeks so averse to ‘real world’ paper they’d rather not wipe their bums on it. (With this market in mind, trend-aware bog roll brand Charmin has just brought out a new line in NFTPs – non-fungible toilet paper.) Hirst is right: NFTs are the latest manifestation of the disconnect between art and money. But are they the ultimate manifestation? In the metaverse the other half are now living in, I fear not.  

Laura Gascoigne
September/October 2020

Six weeks ago, a Hampstead neighbour left a book on our doorstep. We have got used to acts of kindness from strangers; at the start of lockdown another neighbour posted a book of poetry through our door to cheer us up. My husband read it, and it did. But this book was different, as was its intention. It was a copy of Reni Eddo-Lodge’s bestseller Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, with an unsigned post-it note attached. “I’m sure you are good people,” was the gist of its message, “but every time I go up and down the street the lamps in your window make me uncomfortable”. I can’t quote it word for word as it was thrown away. The book wasn’t thrown away; my husband read it. To me it smacked too much of re-education, and I disliked the passive-aggressive anonymity of the note.

The lamps have been in my family as long as I remember. They travelled with us from Cairo, where my father had opened the first English language bookshop after the war, to Belgium where he managed the Brussels branch of W H Smith and on to Cambridge, where he ran a university bookshop. The black figures supporting the lampshades – both dressed in Persian trousers, the man wearing a plumed turban and the woman a tasselled tarboosh – are not a legacy of the transatlantic slave trade: they represent Nubians in the service of an Egyptian Pasha.

The lamps, in other words, are Orientalist, part of that fantasy of the exotic East that swept through Europe in the 19th century, catching the imaginations not only of the sorts of sleazy Salon painters of slave markets and harems that now make us uncomfortable, but of Delacroix and later Picasso – a fantasy that made Arabian Nights a far bigger best-seller than Eddo-Lodge’s extended charge sheet of facts and figures will ever be. Imagination is a shadowy thing that fades in the full beam of facts and figures, yet it is the stuff of which culture is made. Still, nobody wants to make their neighbours uncomfortable or invite anonymous bricks unaccompanied by post-its through the windows, so the offending lamps are now upstairs lighting the desk on which I am writing this.

For good or ill, these lamps are part of my heritage; I won’t disown them, nor will I disown the rest of it. So here, for the record, is a full confession. My first word was ‘Abdul’, the name of our Egyptian servant; hearing my mother call him around our Cairo apartment I obviously thought I’d try it myself. If that makes me a dyed-in-the-wool imperialist, how about this: my father’s ancestor Sir Thomas Warner, a soldier in the service of Elizabeth I, founded the first British Caribbean colony on St Kitts where his tomb still stands. My grandfather Plum Warner was born in Port of Spain and moved to England to pursue his passion for cricket, eventually captaining the England team; his brother Aucher captained the first combined West Indies side. There was no money in non-professional cricket, so despite being knighted for services to the ‘gentleman’s game’ Plum left my father £50 on his death.

Does all of this make me feel uncomfortable? It’s my past and there’s nothing I can do to change it. History, personal and national, is a complex business which – forgive the cliché – is never black and white. But public statues are different from personal property. The people of Bristol were perfectly within their rights to object to public space being occupied by a monument to a slave trader who salved his conscience through philanthropy – an objection doubly justified by the fact that the statue was put up 80 years after the Abolition Act. In the same way, many of the confederate statues defaced or torn down during the Black Lives Matter protests in America were erected in the 20th century in reaction to desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement; in historical terms, they’re as fake as a Disneyland fairy castle. As the ancient historian Matthew Sears wisely remarked two years ago: “Let’s not forget that monuments tell us much more about those who set them up than those they represent.” New statues of Stalin are even now going up in Russia so that Putin can bask in the reflected glory of an earlier strong man who defeated the Germans.

What does Marc Quinn’s statue, Surge of Power: Jen Reid, tell us about the man who set it up? That he’s a shameless opportunist ready to piggyback on a black woman’s spontaneous political gesture for his own self-promotion. I punched the air myself when I heard that within 24 hours Bristol’s mixed-race mayor Marvin Rees had had the 3-D scanned and printed resin effigy hauled away in a skip lorry and was billing the artist for removal. Better still, the black British sculptor Thomas J Price, winner of a new commission for a Windrush monument in Hackney, denounced Quinn’s stunt as “yet another example of white privilege in action” and accused him of having a “saviour complex”. Ouch.

The trouble with empty plinths, of course, is the temptation to fill them. As Hew Locke – who registered his own protest against Colston in 2006 by encrusting a photograph of his statue with gewgaws – observed when the dominoes started falling: “The newly empty plinths are all potential Fourth Plinths”. God forbid. But can we fill them with replacement heroes? Is any public figure squeaky clean enough? And how will they be apportioned between ethnicities? Sadiq Khan’s newly formed Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm has got its work cut out. 

History will not be erased by removing statues, as the Democratic Football Lads Alliance – keen historians that they are – would have us believe. Ninety-nine percent of the population have no idea who the statues they pass everyday represent anyway, and would only miss them as figures in the composition of the urban landscape. For most people they’re just a shape on the periphery of vision, breaking up the harsh geometry of the city with a human form, a function that when made by actual sculptors – not Gillian Wearing – they fulfil very well. As such, we will miss them. Where they cause offence they can always be removed to museums or designated sculpture parks, like those on the outskirts of New Delhi and Budapest, to be ‘contextualised’ away from their original context. 

But we can’t remove all reminders of our imperial past. After all the offending statues have been taken away, what are we going to do about all the grand civic buildings built with imperial money? Dismantle them stone by stone and ship them overseas to the former colonies that paid for them with their blood, sweat and tears? Nothing in the historic environment of our major cities is guilt-free, but full reparation will never be possible. “Guilt is never of real use. Except for the guilty,” writes Bonnie Greer in July’s Art Newspaper. “Neither is historical ignorance”. Removing things that make us uncomfortable from our field of vision is pure hypocrisy. Everyone enjoying the relative wealth of this country today is benefiting from, if not complicit in, the history that made us rich. Don’t hide away the evidence. Deal with it.

Laura Gascoigne
July/August 2020

You’re a curator working at the V&A, and the place shuts down. What do you do? You’re at a loose end. April comes around and you’re stuck at home with your furloughed partner watching your gerbils spin around on the rolly wheel of life when an idea strikes you. Why should your pets enjoy normality as if nothing has happened? Why not disrupt it with some challenging art?

Maybe I’m being unfair to Filippo Lorenzin. Maybe his experience of government-imposed confinement woke him up to the monotony of his pets’ lives and made him want to relieve it. Whatever the motive, he constructed a miniature white cube gallery, hung it with rodent versions of famous paintings such as Il Gerbilio con L’Orecchino di Perla and added an official notice cautioning DO NOT CHEW. “It was fun to play around with the white cube aesthetics and the raw energy of our gerbils,” he told The Art Newspaper – energy directed by Pandoro and Tiramisu, as by most young gallery-goers, into posting selfies of themselves admiring the art on Instagram.

With the arrival of Covid-19 this year’s silly season started early. In May it was the turn of art documentary maker Jared Schiller to adorn his chicken run in Kent with a Hyde Park railings-style hang of works by his friends. Unlike the gerbils, who took an active interest, Schiller’s hens looked unimpressed by the works of George Shaw, Goshka Macuga, Richard Wentworth et al., though they showed more appreciation for Girl’s Night Out in Peck-ham, an assemblage of bird seed with which they interacted to the point of destruction. Meanwhile across the pond in Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum, director Julián Zugazagoitia invited a family of Peruvian penguins from the locked-down local zoo to explore his museum’s equally deserted galleries, where he noted their preference for Caravaggio over Monet. 

Silly, yes, but more watchable than most online attempts by panicked museum directors to keep audiences on board. And they’re right to panic, because what if the months of lockdown show us that – like cheap flights, fast fashion and priapic office buildings – we can live without museums? So the show must go on and venerable institutions must compete with freelance Instagrammers for the public’s attention. In May the Met invited owners of the latest AR software to project a gurning zemí ancestor figure from its closed Caribbean Arte del Mar exhibition into their cars, backyards or shower stalls. “I like to see the energy redistributed in digital form so it can reach people in their lives today,” said the show’s curator James Doyle. A prize bit of blarney if ever I heard one. Share my shower with a zemí? Totally psycho.

Out of sight, out of mind is the worry for museums, but shifting audiences online could make matters worse. The Rijksmuseum’s bumper lockdown menu of “10 ways to visit… without leaving home” features a new online platform Rijksmuseum Masterpieces Up Close that “aims to recreate the experience of casually browsing a museum with a multimedia guide”. But why leave home ever if you can enjoy a similar, even enhanced experience from your sofa? That is, after all, the experience most gallery visitors today want. Let’s not pretend, however, that there’s anything casual about ‘browsing’ a museum with special software. It’s a mediated experience. What’s missing is the essential element of aimlessness and, with it, the possibility of an accidental discovery that you alone have made.

Smaller galleries without the digital resources of the Met or the Rijksmuseum have had to find other ways of keeping their heads above the waters of oblivion. The ICA moved fast and on day one of the lockdown launched ICA Daily, a selection of links recommended by director Stefan Kalmár to “cheer you up while self-isolating, social-distancing, working from home or working to keep essential services going.” Nice thought, Stefan, but can you really imagine an ICU nurse coming off a 12-hour shift and stripping off her PPA and surgical gloves to sample his inaugural programme of 11 years of ICA talks, Ojerime’s latest mix-tape B4/Breakdown – “a mix of dark, melancholic R&B with emotion-filled vocals” – or Dennis Cooper’s 10th novel Zac’s Haunted House, a “graphic tale of abject horror in a tightly wound work beyond words”? I thought not. (See page 43)

True, she wouldn’t have got much solace either from White Cube’s lockdown series of artists’ diaries featuring a confession on 3 April from Tracy Emin that she got out on the wrong side of her bed that morning and shouted at a complete stranger: “Get between the lines you fucking idiot!” What our essential worker might have welcomed on return to self-isolation with a leaky faucet was Newlyn Art Gallery’s Idle Women: Power Tools, a series of household DIY videos made by women for women. That’s more like it. ‘How to fix a dripping tap?’ Yes!  ‘Reseal a sink?’ Yes! ‘Drill into a brick wall?’ Yes, yes, yes! Smash a double-glazed window? Err possibly… Why? Not to steal a Cornish second-homeowner’s telly when yours has broken, as I wrongly assumed, but to get out when there’s a fire. Good sensible advice.

Given that ‘Hello, I’m still here’ is the basic message behind all this electronic signalling for attention, Kettle’s Yard went for the most basic option: a webcam (illustration). Trained on “a part of the house both shadowy and light-filled” featuring a window, a suspended 1960s Perspex disc by Gregorio Vardanegas and a shelf of straggly houseplants, it was designed to allow “virtual visitors to trace the light changes through the day” from 5.30am to 8.30pm. I tried it for a couple of minutes (I haven’t got all day) during which the only change was the occasional spasmodic jerk as the lagging webcam caught up with the reflection of a different bit of straggly houseplant in the Perspex disc. Only mind-expanding drugs would have made it watchable.

Still, Kettle’s Yard gets points for simplicity. The best online offerings give you a page of thumbnails to click on and let you get on with it. The BP Portrait Award, which has adopted this format, works perfectly well online since most of the paintings are photorealist and gain nothing from being seen in the flesh. And the online shopping model is a perfect fit for selling exhibitions: while the economy tanks, online art sales have been going up.

You know where you are with a selling exhibition; there’s no need to fanny about with digital innovation if you’re not pretending to perform a public service. The past weeks of lockdown have made me appreciate the honest directness of the old exhibition model where art is displayed for sale. I felt nostalgic recently listening to John Kasmin on the British Library Sounds website reminiscing about how David Hockney’s early exhibitions in his New Bond Street gallery were full of students chomping sandwiches on his Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs. That was a public service that paid for itself. Meanwhile the billionaire owner of the Evening Standard, Evgeny Lebedev, has been lamenting in his paper that “the arts risk a return to the hobby of the elites rather than a democratic pursuit”. In the visual arts, at least, that would mean reverting to a model that produced all the masterpieces in the Rijksmuseum, and still appears to function best in a crisis.

Laura Gascoigne
May/June 2020

At the exit to Tate Modern’s Andy Warhol exhibition, the gift shop tills were barricaded behind an airport queue management system. “You’re preparing for an invasion,” I joshed with a cashier as I emerged from the press view on 10 March. “We’re prepared for anything,” he replied.

What they weren’t prepared for was nothing, which – within a week – is what we were left with. Days later they started dropping into the mailbox, the regretful notices of museum closures: the first crack in the dam on 13 March was the Wellcome Collection and the trickle quickly became a flood. The big public galleries with most to lose in visitor numbers hung on longer: on 16 March came news from the National Gallery of the postponement of its Artemisia Gentileschi show, but still no word from a tight-lipped Tate – I had to go on their website to find out they’d closed two days later. Then came the emails from commercial galleries announcing, hopefully, that they were still ‘open by appointment’.

An art world without galleries is a ghostly thing. Commentators attempted measured responses: “It is unlikely that we will hear the refrain ‘business as usual’ any time soon,” was Thomas Marks’ laconic forecast in his April Editor’s Letter in Apollo. As my late mother-in-law used to delight in saying in a menacing tone: “There’ll be some changes made”. Some will be for the worse but, on the evidence so far, some may be for the better.

On the plus side, the media obsession with ‘time-sensitivity’ has gone out the window, with no tears shed over its defenestration by this arts correspondent. It always seemed to me absurd to be hounded from one press view to the next by arts editors so desperate to be ahead of the news curve they commissioned previews of shows one hadn’t seen, only to set off stampedes of sheep into gallery basements to shuffle past redisplays of pictures they could have enjoyed at leisure, and for free, the week before upstairs.

Another hopeful sign: fewer art fairs. TEFAF New York Spring has been collapsed into Fall, Masterpiece London is cancelled and the Ifema hangar that recently housed ARCO Madrid has been turned over to a coronavirus hospital. Biennale-hopping will be brought to a halt when the budget airlines all go bust. Manifesta 13 in Marseilles and the second Riga Biennial are both up on blocks, while the locked-down Biennale of Sydney has gone virtual – like Art Basel Hong Kong, a visitor experience described by Susan Moore in Apollo as “not so different from my recent online grocery shopping” – though easier to access for anyone not signed up to Ocado before the coronacrisis.

It’s an ill plague wind that blows nobody good, as the purveyors of sex toys to the self-isolated are discovering: sales up 13% here, 60% in Italy. Meanwhile virtual reality companies are profiteering from locked-down art lovers clambering onto ‘extended reality [XR] platforms’ to head for the virtual hills. On the heels of the closure notices came an email announcing the April launch of Vortic, a new XR platform for the art world offering “customisable virtual gallery spaces, supported by two seamlessly integrated virtual [VR] and augmented reality [AR] apps.” Don’t ask me what the difference is, I have enough difficulty navigating the real-world real world of RR [real reality]. But for collectors up to speed with these things they open up the possibility of virtual bring-a-bottle private view pyjama parties, with the ability “to make direct real-time enquiries with galleries”. Good that something in the post-Covid-19 Space-Time continuum will remain real. Oh and the moolah too, for those who still have it.

Meanwhile public galleries without access to extended reality are struggling to lure audiences online. After the torrent of announcements of RR gallery closures came the drip-drip of invitations to visit gallery websites. My first indication from Tate Modern that something was wrong was the announcement of “an exclusive online-only performance” by Congolese artist Faustin Linyekula originally programmed for the BMW Tate Live Exhibition season but obliged to run on empty in the Tate Tanks. That might have attracted a few performance freaks, but getting the general public excited about online displays is more difficult. For most gallery-goers, visiting exhibitions is about the satisfaction of having been there and done that, just as cultural destinations were for cruise ship travellers in the days before they were all quarantined in their cabins. Scholars and researchers trawl online collections, but the general public only visits gallery websites for information on opening times and prices.

Worse, websites can’t be monetised and even closed galleries haemorrhage funds. A survey by Americans for the Arts estimated that by 18 March the pandemic had cost the US non-profit arts sector $3.2bn – to put that in perspective, just under half the 2018 GDP of Malawi. The Met is expecting a shortfall of $100m on its annual operating budget of $320m. “We very much hope that the cultural world of New York can survive this,” its president Daniel Weiss told The Art Newspaper ­– an expression of hope that didn’t sound that hopeful.

Is it curtains for culture? For smaller institutions with no discretionary resources or endowments, prospects are bleak: in America it’s feared that a third of small rural museums may not reopen. Here the prognosis for independent institutions outside the charmed circle of National Portfolio Organisations is grim. As for small commercial galleries operating on a shoestring, the expectation that a third will close sounds optimistic. While White Cube was reopening in Hong Kong on 17 March, they were battening down the hatches. Rent holidays only prolong the agony. As for wage packets, there was cold comfort to be taken from ACE’s announcement on 24 March of a £160m emergency response package, of which £50m is reserved for non-NPOs and £20m for individual ‘creative practitioners and cultural workers’ – including writers, translators, editors, freelance educators and curators, all adepts at filling out applications.

How much will be left over for artists? (The portal for Round Two closes on 30 April: quick or you’ll miss it.) As for Rishi Sunak’s promised handouts, the most self-isolated of the self-employed will be last in line. The only good news is that the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution, which sends out an annual begging letter to buyers of its Christmas cards entreating them to bring its services to the attention of indigent artists of their acquaintance, will finally come into its own. There’ll be queues stretching around the Burlington House courtyard into Piccadilly.

There’s no silver lining to this poison cloud, except the faint hope that when it lifts it will leave behind a medicine bottle labelled ‘Drink Me’ whose effects will make everything in our bloated art world shrink. No more Brobdingnagian new museums, brain-numbing blockbusters and backbreaking biennials, and no more money to piss away on pointless public art. With a post-COVID-19 depression hanging over us will anyone shed tears over the postponed unveiling of Heather Phillipson’s whipped cream sculpture on the Fourth Plinth, with its cherry, fly and surveillance drone on top? “I wanted to make a monument to hubris and impending collapse,” the Cassandra of the Cornetto told the Financial Times. It was called ‘THE END’; now it may never come.

Laura Gascoigne
March/April 2020

Large woman to much smaller man at a party: “I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?” James Thurber was the Thucydides of the gender war, dissecting its battlegrounds, victories and reversals with his pen: the fight in the grocery, the battle on the stairs; the rout where the men have the women briefly on the run and the surrender where their leader capitulates to a baseball bat-wielding Boadicea; the female capture of three physics professors and the female spy reporting back on crutches. It’s a nasty business, and judging from the eruption of hostilities in the pages of The Jackdaw it’s not over yet.

Alexander Adams’ Women in Art Today survey in September set out to demonstrate that women are now equally, if not over-generously, represented in the visual arts and consequently have no axes left to grind. The statistics he gathered from 2018 to 2019 showed more female appointments to administrative and curatorial positions, more female winners of fine art prizes and more female-only art events. He didn’t measure representation in public gallery shows, though a glance through the current exhibition schedules certainly seems to confirm a bias in favour of women. The Tate is devoting five solo shows to women artists – Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Paula Rego, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Maria Martuszová and Haegue Yang – over the next two years, and this year’s headline-grabber at the National Gallery is Artemisia Gentileschi.

Truly, a sexual revolution is upon us. The trouble, as Adams was too courteous to point out, is that the women chosen to represent their sex are not always that great. This is not because Brian Sewell was right and women artists are just not as good as men; it’s because historically they have tended to be saved from artistic oblivion by their association with male artists rather than their talent.

Check out the women artists given solo shows at Tate Modern over the past few years: Sonia Delaunay, wife of Robert (2015); Georgia O’Keeffe, wife of Alfred Stieglitz (2016); Dorothea Tanning, wife of Max Ernst (2019); Dora Maar, muse of Picasso. This does not necessarily reflect on the quality of the work ­ I enjoyed the Tanning and the Maar exhibitions – but it is noticeable that Agnes Martin (2015) is the only singleton (she preferred women) to have been so honoured.

Men are better than women at getting themselves noticed by clubbing together in art movements-cum-drinking schools. They understand the principle of critical mass. Lazy critics love an art movement; they’re less likely to miss a group of like-painting people than a lone original. Originality, although theoretically prized in art, is in practice often missed because it’s isolated. Women artists are less clubbable than men. They may club together over children but, perhaps because confined to quarters by said children, they tend to work in professional isolation.

Susan Wilson once wrote an article for the Guardian titled ‘I didn’t know you had a baby’ after a remark made by a male art teaching colleague when she joined the lads in the pub after work – something she felt she had to do to be taken seriously. It’s not surprising that some of the most dedicated women artists – Gwen John, Joan Eardley, Agnes Martin – have been childless, but they too were never really part of any movements; they were artistic dead-ends. Ironically, it may have been Gwen John’s association with a more famous male artist, her brother Augustus – who recognised that she was the greater painter – that saved her from falling through the cracks like so many of her female peers. There are, of course, also male artists who have been dead-ends, most of them mummy’s boys like Morandi and Lowry. It would be interesting to conduct a survey measuring how much testosterone contributes to artistic success. Can it be linked to that distinctly masculine attribute ‘genius’? I’ve never heard the term applied to a woman. 

Anne Desmet answered Adams’ points pretty comprehensively in her November letter, and I’ve got nothing to add. All I will say is that for a campaigner against identitarianism and its culture of victimhood, Adams’ whole project had a whiff of male victimhood about it. I’m also unconvinced that feminism, in the broad sense of the term, can be defined as identitarian. Being female is not an identity – not yet at least – it’s a gender. You can’t lump women together as ‘victims’ with ethnic or sexual minorities when you’re talking about half the population.

I won’t deny that it’s tough being a white male artist today; I have every sympathy for any non-ethnic minority man trying to make his way in the art world as currently constituted. I know of one white mid-career male artist who recently had a show at a regional gallery cancelled because the organisers felt they couldn’t justify spending public money on an artist from such a historically privileged group, and confessed as much. Adams is right to campaign against arts funding being devoted to social engineering. But although the constant liberal checking of white male privilege grates, it’s arguable that a correction is overdue. Plus the alternative is not an appealing prospect. Who knows what the fate of arts funding will be under the regency of Demonic Cummings, when he’s finished with the BBC? So far the visual arts have been beneath his liberal-tracking radar. Be careful what you wish for.

Time to call a truce? Imbalances naturally tend to level out. At the present rate of consumption galleries will run out of dead women artists unless curators do some serious research to dig out new ones. Those so far unearthed have been of uneven quality. The Baroque painter Michaelina Wautier, dusted off by the Rubens House in Antwerp in 2018, looks a serious contender, but the Renaissance nun Plautilla Nelli being promoted – and expensively restored – by a bunch of bien-pensante Americans in Florence marching under the banner of Advancing Women Artists is an obvious dud. The pages of Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race are sprinkled with muzzy monochrome photographs of paintings by forgotten women, some of whom – like Giovanna Garzoni with her exquisite Dish of Broad Beans – clearly merit further investigation, and maybe the funding will now be forthcoming.

Of living women artists there is obviously no shortage. But, as Anne Desmet points out, despite increasing parity in public gallery exposure women remain poorly represented by top-end dealers, who find it a fag to get their prices up – a difficulty that will persist until there are equal numbers of women collectors. Women may represent half the population, but the moneyed half doesn’t always want to buy what they choose to represent. One reason why women abstract artists like Bridget Riley and Gillian Ayres fare better in a male-dominated market than their figurative peers is that their work does not reflect female experience. The truth, and I may be trolled for telling it – except that I’m not on social media, tee-hee – is that men’s art tends to appeal to men and women’s art to women. What woman collector would want a late period Picasso?

If this is a problem, it will only be solved when the idea of there being two sexes loses its appeal. Call me old-fashioned, but I hope it doesn’t.