In order to examine the effectiveness of the ‘activist art’ as a tool, protesting the recognition that women and artists of color deserve in the art scene, a basic understanding of the systems in which art gets exhibited, exchanged, and criticized is necessary. Oppositional groups such as Guerilla Girls certainly do have an influence on the power structure within the art industry, but their influence is gradual, rather than immediate.
When The Guerilla Girls were asked whether art is judged based on quality, or if women and artists of color are simply victims of racist biased intentions, their response pointed several issues. Quoting Lee Kranser, one of the Guerilla Girls: “The world of high art, the kind that gets into museums and history books, is run by a very small group of people. Our posters have proved over and over again that these people, no matter how smart or good intentioned, have been biased against women and artists of color.”[1] What Lee Kranser points out is the very fundamental conditional relation between art and its own institutions and organizations, and studying this relation leads us to the issue of power, both of art and over art. Referring to Jeremy Valentine: “Sometimes this question [the question of power] takes banal and mundane, perhaps trivial form, with issues such as dealers, collectors, critics, curators and administrators. At other times the question is posed in more elevated terms of the relations between art and life.”[2] In other words, art has always been subjected to the power structures that control and influence the high art industry, which is according to Valentine dealers, collectors, critics, curators and administrators and of course museums. But Valentine takes another factor into account as well: the relation between art and life. How one’s views and ideologies may effect art, or in particular high art industry. Citing Joy Senack: “Ideologies are super structures based on the ideas, or systems of ideas, that prevail at any given time in any social group. They are erected upon the realities of the social structure but they may reflect these realities in a biased manner.”[3] Most of the influential participants of the art industry are affected by white male heterosexual western ‘ideologies’, Thus the art administrations act biased against works of women, artists of color, homosexuals, and non-western artists.
At the core of this power structure are the critics, whose influence or general impression of a work of art cannot be overlooked. According to Jeremy Valentine, “The political significance of art cannot be determined by any established political or aesthetic critical criteria, precisely because the relation between the two terms has increasingly become arbitrary.”[4] That is to say the relation between the art object and its interpretations, established by the critics who share different political values, is so arbitrary that a misinterpretation is very likely. Therefore in such circumstances that the authority of the critical misinterpretations conceals the actual meaning of an art work, the white-male-heterosexual-western gaze influences critics, and results in disrespect of the actual value of any art produced against such ‘ideologies’.
Another part of the power structure is museums and organizations that exhibit works of art. Jeremy Valentine, a critic of these institutions argues that: “the museum codifies and bureaucratizes cultural experience, imposing uniformity and eliminating difference.”[5] As a result of this, museum displays a restricted relation to knowledge, that Bennet called the ‘exhibitory complex’, which structures a hierarchy of power over that which is known. Yet visitors are encouraged to identify the museum as a superior ‘knower’ over what it represents as ‘known’.[6] Therefore because the museum has this selfish perspective, and at the same time it is part of a bigger power structure which shares unified ‘ideologies’ with critics, collectors and dealers, not every type of art gets exhibited. Only those are qualified that either agree with its mentality or take a neutral position. Perhaps a very famous example
The third part of the power structure is the political economy in the art industry, which views art as a commodity. Becoming a commodity, an art work not only may lose its value for what it is, but it also becomes the subject of dealers and collectors’ evaluation. As the critical theorist Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it over fifty years ago in their work Dialectic of Enlightenment, in capitalist market the tendency is that: “everything is looked at from only one aspect; that it can be used for something else, however vague the notion of this use may be. No object has inherent value; it is valuable only to the extent that it can be exchanged.”[8] This part of the power structure’s concern is only the exchange value of art work, and it follows, like the rest of the power structure, the white-male-heterosexual-western ideology, mainly because it believes: this is what sells.
[1] Guerilla Girls (whoever they really are). “Guerilla Girls bare all: An Interview” Confessions of the Guerilla Girls. ( HarperPerinial, 1995), 25.
[2] Valentine, Jeremy. “Empire and Art: Aesthetic Autonomy, Organizational Meditation and Contextualizing Practices” Art, Money, Parties: New Institution in the Political Economy of Contemporary Art. (
[3] Senack, Joy. “The Economics of Value” Value, Art and the Market: A Study in the Political Economy of Value and the Evolution of a Modern Art Market. (
[4] Valentine, Jeremy. “Empire and Art: Aesthetic Autonomy, Organizational Meditation and Contextualizing Practices” Art, Money, Parties: New Institution in the Political Economy of Contemporary Art. (
[5] Ibid, 201.
[6] Ibid, 201.
[7] Ibid, 203.
[8] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. (Continuum, 1995), 158.
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