En/gendering the modern: MoMA and the making the market for modern art a "man's world"

Robson, Deirdre ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6763-0352 (2016) En/gendering the modern: MoMA and the making the market for modern art a "man's world". In: Visible Hands: Markets and the Marking of American Art, 22 January 2016, London, UK. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

In the mid-to-late 1960s in North America it was claimed that “art has long been recognized as a sound area of investment” (Porter, 1969). This demonstrates a shift in United States attitudes toward art collecting. Unstated and unexamined is that extolling “investment” in art is an expression of an implicit gendered correlation between art collecting and the “public” sphere of (masculine) business. This ran counter what Douglas (1977) called the “feminization of culture” in North America, where women were conventionally seen as key consumers of high culture. This paper discusses the role played by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in shifting such gendered attitudes to art collecting, including the modernist in-gallery presentation of art adopted by MoMA from the 1930s onwards. It is intended to show MoMA’s success in impacting upon collecting practice, and illuminate the impact of efforts to re-gender art collecting and change attitudes on the part of potential American collectors of modern art. By such strategies, Barr hoped to ameliorate the gulf between European and American collectors, and by extrapolation art market centres.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Keywords: art market MoMA museum of modern art gender art collecting American art
Subjects: Arts > Art and design history
Arts
Depositing User: Deirdre Robson
Date Deposited: 30 Apr 2016 15:23
Last Modified: 28 Aug 2021 07:06
URI: https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1984

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