New perspectives and reflections on Women Can’t Paint: Gender, the Glass Ceiling and Values in Contemporary Art

This paper brings new perspectives and reflections upon the research carried out for my book Women Can’t Paint: Gender, the Glass Ceiling and Values in Contemporary Art (Gørrill, 2020) published by Bloomsbury. My PhD and book’s title were inspired by the German painter Georg Baselitz’s infamous statement about our female creatives “What’s the biggest problem with women artists? None of them can actually paint!” (Clark, 2013). And Women Can’t Paint was conceived, firstly as a PhD to prove sufficient, robust evidence that Baselitz is wrong, and then as a book encompassing a far wider geography than the original research. It is important to remember that Baselitz based his judgement on the economic value of artworks: “Women don’t pass the test, the market test – the value test” (Beyer & Knofel, 2015), because there are significant gender value gaps in contemporary art, of up to ninety per cent between female and male artists.