Guerrilla Girls: Conscience of the Art World

I went to a lecture tonight by two of the founding members of the Guerrilla Girls. Best decision I made in a while, I must say. The lecture was AWESOME, very enlightening and humorous. I remember the first poster I saw of them was of a nude female statue with a gorilla mask on and the caption, "Do women have be naked to be in US museums? Only 3% of artists in the Met Museum are female, but 83% of the nudes are female". Apparently they did a resurveying of the Met a few months ago and now the statistics read, 4% female artists and 74% nude female statues. So CLEARLY, there's a lot of work to be done still about the representation of female artists and artists of color.

Guerrilla Girls 2007 Shanghai poster
The two Guerrilla Girls spoke a lot about the lack of museum ethics (trustees paying their way to show their private collections, fixed art auctions, tokenism), the evolving set of issues they've addressed over the years (from complete lack of female artists in exhibition to token multicultural or female artists to the bad money issues to other social justice issues), politics, and many a museum protest. Who knew museum directors make so much money?? The black market for art is 5th behind drugs, sex, guns, and human trafficking. I mean, I kinda knew that art was lucrative, but not THAT lucrative. It's funny how the museums have now started to invite the Guerrilla Girls to exhibit their work and they've taken the opportunity to make some criticial pieces of tough love against the system. But it does get the message out.

The take home message at the end (and directives for future aspiring Guerrilla Girls):

1. Complain, complain, complain. Every person who stands up to demand more female and minority presence in museums and other institution makes a difference.
2. Be anonymous. There's a lot of power in the mask - it takes the focus off the personality and on the issue.
3. Don't be afraid to make liberal use of the F word - FEMINISM.
4. Do one thing at a time and if it doesn't work, try something else. There are a lot of social justice issues out there and trying to battle them all at once is pretty overwhelming. Just take it one step at a time and don't give up.
5. Be funny! A little humor goes a long way in getting awareness about social justice issues.
6. Tough love to the system! Don't be afraid to speak your mind about it.