Art and Women: a history of exclusion

Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy
1. Art and Artists: Historical Background
The concept of the artist has its own gender skew. For much of the modern period, the very best examples of fine art were understood to be the creative products of artists with special talent amounting to “genius,” and genius is a trait that possesses especially emphatic gender meaning.
2. Creativity and Genius
While genius is a rare gift, according to most theorists the pool of human beings from which genius emerges includes only men. Rousseau, Kant, and Schopenhauer all declared that women possess characters and mentalities too weak to produce genius. This judgment represents a particular instance of more general theories that attribute to males the strongest and most important qualities of mind, in comparison to which females are but paler counterparts. At least since Aristotle, rationality and incisive intellect have been regarded as “masculine” traits that women possess in lesser degrees than males.
3. Aesthetic Categories and Feminist Critiques
Kant states, “The man develops his own taste while the woman makes herself an object of everybody's taste.” (Kant 1798/1978, p. 222)

(..) vision, the quintessential aesthetic sense, possesses power: power to objectify — to subject the object of vision to scrutiny and possession.
4. Feminist Practice and the Concept of Art
Feminist artists have challenged the ideas that art's main value is aesthetic, that it is for contemplation rather than use, that it is ideally the vision of a single creator, that it should be interpreted as an object of autonomous value (Devereaux 1998).

Feminist artists opened up previously taboo subjects such as menstruation and childbirth for artistic presentation, and they began to employ female body images widely in their work.
5. The Body in Art and Philosophy
The uses of food on the part of female artists is particularly significant, given the traditional association of women with the body, with feeding and nurturance, and with transience and mortality. The very presence of large amounts of these creations in the artworld today has contributed to consternation on the part of professionals and public alike about just how art is to be defined and conceived. There is no particular feminist “definition” of art, but there are many uses to which feminists and postfeminists turn their creative efforts: exploring gender and sexuality as well as criticizing the traditions of art and of beauty imposed by aesthetic standards of the past.

A fasincating, clear-sighted trip through the ever-developing landscape of ideas about art, the artist and gender.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Feminist Aesthetics

Art (from top to bottom): Untitled film still no.22, 1978, Cindy Sherman; no title, 1989, Cindy Sherman; Portrait with scorpion (closed eyes), 2005, Marina Abramovic; Dinner party, 1974-1979, Judy Chicago; Virgin Warrior Hearts, 2006, Marina Abramovic