Are You Qualified?

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Notes

¹Proclamations of the “death of painting” are found throughout the twentieth century, notably by those artists involved in what art historians call avant-garde practices, including Marcel Duchamp's rejection of painting as too retinal, the 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings exhibit in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in December 1915, the 1921 exhibition 5 × 5 = 25 held in Moscow where Alexsandr Rodchenko declared his three monochrome canvases in red, blue, and yellow to be the end of painting, and the strategic move by many feminist artists to move away from traditional painting, still under the stranglehold of High Modernism, in order to proclaim the importance of craft art and therefore recoup artistic practices smothered under the banner of “low art.”

²According to Douglas Eklund, this label was applied by “postmodern superstar” Jeff Koons. I here perpetuate the terminology in order to illustrate Koons's infantilizing move, which implies that “theory” is too heavy for “girls,” as the terms read as incompatible in our linguistic structures. Theory, the realm of the academic and the intellectual, is mitigated through the addition of “girls,” thereby preventing any power move on the part of Sherman, Kruger, Holzer, and Levine.

³In 2010, MoMA published Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz. The publication features a plethora of scholarly essays that address the role of women as patrons, artists, protestors, and cultural shapers, giving voice to a large segment of MoMA's history notably absent from the mainstream discourse.