Comment to 'What have we learned from the Guerrilla Girls work, “The Male Graze”?'
  • This is a super delicate topic and extremely hard to put into a context that doesn't become offensive or that is going seem wired.

    First consideration is around the evolution of the moral. What is racist today, was normal 10 years ago. 

    Until up the mid '50s was normal to marry a girl that was 14 (and even younger), and today is of course a big scandal. 

    Where do you draw the line?

    Imo if an artist today does any abuse (age, gender, discrimination etc) should be purged by the art world. Most of the artistic and economic value in the contemporary art lays on the artist reputation and his story. If you destroy your reputation you destroy also your market

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    • I totally agree. It is really important to look at the context where an artist is inserted to understand/judge their acts/values. But surely if you are creating purely sexist art nowadays without any critical justification, you NEED to be analysed accordingly. 

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      • This reminds me of Philip Guston's controversy and his cancelled show at TATE. I mean, hiding controversial artists is not doing any good either because we are technically hiding history. And we have to look at history so that we can do better in the future. In that sense, I do think Guerrilla Girls museum labels proposal is incredibly useful because museums should expose these facts about artists. Thou, we should be careful. It is no ones place to "cancel" any artist reputation ...

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        • Chris JS I think that the fact that it was 'normal' to marry a 14 y.o. girl back in the 50s doesn't mean that it was the right thing to do. I don't think that these children wished to be in an arranged marriage.

          The point of the Guerrilla Girls is that this information should be part of the discourse about the artist

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