According to a BBC documentary, a female artist costs 10 times less than a male one

Works created by a male artist are, on average, sold at ten times the price of those of female colleagues: presenting this calculation is a BBC documentary entitled Recalculating Art, which will air on August 11, but whose contents were anticipated in a Guardian article. The disparities even begin at the top of the pyramid: the most expensive painting ever sold in an auction, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, beats the world record set by a woman, Georgia O’Keefe, by 10 times ($450 million vs. $44.4), and the same proportions apply to records set by living artists (the most expensive living male ever in an auction is Jeff Koons, $91 million, while the female record belongs to Jenny Saville, with $12.5 million).

However, the 10-to-1 disparity also affects the lower end of the chain, the documentary explains. The proportion comes from a study done by feminist art historian Helen Gorrill, author of the book Women can’t paint, who studied the prices of 5,000 paintings sampled around the world and found that for every pound earned by a male, a woman earned only 10 pence. “It’s the most shocking gender value gap I’ve ever encountered in any industry,” Gorrill said during Recalculating Art. And this is despite the fact that women make up 70 percent of art school students. In addition, again according to Gorrill, while the value of a work made by a male increases if it is signed, the value of a work tends to decrease if a woman has signed it, as if it were tainted by gender.

To understand whether the difference depends on the quality of the work, a finance professor at Oxford University, Renée Adams, performed a simple empirical test, showing participants five paintings by men and five by women and asking them to identify the gender of the artist. The percentage of correct answers was 50 percent, which Adams said would be evidence that men’s art is no better than women’s. Again, Adams showed a sample of affluent males who routinely visit art galleries a painting created by an artificial intelligence, and some were told it was painted by a man, others were told it was painted by a woman: the scholar found that collectors who were told the work was painted by a man appreciated the painting more.

“Women artists have fared very badly,” explained Frances Morris, director of the Tate Modern, “because there has been unconscious collusion between the market, art history, and institutions. Everybody lacks confidence, everybody is looking for confirmation. So there has been a kind of confirmation history, which we could call the canon. And, of course, the conventions and history have been formed by patriarchy.” According to the Guardian, the main reflection of the situation described by Frances Morris is the substantial absence of women’s names from art history, or of works made by women in museums.

The good news, the Guardian concludes, is that for women, however, things are beginning to change, with museums trying to rebalance their collections (in the United States, some have even begun deaccessioning works painted by men to buy works by women’s hands), auction houses pushing women, and the institutions themselves organizing exhibitions for women. In addition, although the prices of women artists’ works start from a much lower base, they are currently rising 29 percent faster than men’s artworks. The situation may therefore change soon.

According to a BBC documentary, a female artist costs 10 times less than a male one

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