Are female artists worth collecting? Tate doesn’t seem to think so

The museum preaches diversity, but its annual acquistions suggest that great art is mostly created by men

Featured on theguardian.com

he dire situation for equality in the British visual arts has been laid bare. We’ve reversed back into the Victorian age, where women can’t paint and women can’t write. My research suggests that female creatives are less likely to succeed now than they were in the 1990s. Today, when men’s artwork is signed, it goes up in value; conversely when work by women is signed, it goes down in value, and the addition of a woman’s signature can devalue artwork to the extent that female artists are more likely to leave their work unsigned. Hysteria, the female-specific Victorian malady, has returned to the UK, with women accused of being mad and out of control if they don’t conform to gallerists’ often unreasonable demands.

Pulling greedily from the public purse, our great institutions are largely to blame. This summer, Tate has offered a lively programme of events to entice young people to delve into its collections and ensure the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport continues to be the bedrock of its funding. Museums are responsible for our future histories, which look spectacularly masculine as far as Tate is concerned.

We cringe at the voices of famous male artists and critics declaring their disdain for artists who happen to have been born female: women can’t paint! There’s no such thing as a great woman artist!

And Tate appears to align with these views by collecting only a token proportion of work by women, who form the 74% majority of our fine art graduates. The young people who visit the museum this summer will learn that art’s future is mainly masculine.

While Tate appears to have a 30% cap on the collection of female artists, its allocation of annual budget is even worse, with as little as 13% spent on works by female artists in recent years. This perpetuates the dominance of male artists in the collections and suppresses the value of women’s work. It has been proved that Tate’s collections affect the art market – its former director Alan Bowness even wrote a book on the subject.

The great inequality machine continues to churn and force women out of practice, while the institution’s publicly funded PR department works tirelessly to demonstrate its apparent support for female artists. Last year, Tate announced the progressive appointment of its first female director, Maria Balshaw, but it wasn’t a great start when she offered a trivial response to sexual harassment, perpetuating a blame-the-victim mindset.

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