By: Mary Ann Sieghart / The Guardian


Translation: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

Are men ten times better at painting than women?

You might think so if you listen to German artist Georg Baselitz, who told the Guardian

in 2015

that “women don't paint very well.

It is a fact.

The market doesn't lie."

The market may not be deliberately deceiving us, but it certainly gives the impression that male artists are much better than women.

The most expensive painting ever sold – Leonardo da Vinci's

Salvator Mundi

– fetched $450 million, while the world record for a female artist, Georgia O'Keeffe, is just $44.4 million, a tenth of that amount.

Of course, this is an unfair comparison.

For most of human history, women were not allowed to practice the art in the same way as men, so inevitably there are fewer old masters than old masters.

But even among living artists, Jeff Koons holds the record with $91 million, while the female record held by Jenny Saville is only $12.5 million.

And, if we continue further, a 10:1 disparity still persists.

Helen Gorrill, author of

Women Can't Paint

, studied the prices of five thousand paintings sold around the world, and she found that for every one million pounds a male artist earns for his work, a woman earns only 10 percent of this.

"It's the most shocking gender value gap I've come across in any industry," she told me for

BBC Radio 4

's Art Recalculation documentary.

It's really shocking.

For some time women have made up 70 percent of the student body at well-selected art colleges, and the art world prides itself on its liberal and progressive values.

However, it leads with the biggest pay gap I can think of.

Gorrill came across another surprising find.

While the value of a man's work increases if he has signed it, the value of a woman's work decreases if she has signed it, as if somehow tainted by her gender.

"This is absolutely shocking," she says.

Let's get back to quality.

Could it be that men are simply better artists?

Oxford Finance Professor Renée Adams decided to put the idea to the test.

She showed participants five paintings by men and five by women and asked them to identify the gender of the artist.

They got it right 50 percent of the time—no better than flipping a coin.

This is pretty good evidence that men's art is no different and therefore no better than women's art.

It then showed wealthy male gallery-goers – the classic profile of an art collector – a sample, an AI-generated painting, while randomly assigning the name of a male or female artist.

If collectors were told it was painted by a man, they said they liked it more than if they were told it was painted by a woman.

As she says: "Same artist, same painting".

How did we get here?

Frances Morris, director at Tate Modern, says: "Women artists have been paid very poorly because there has been an unconscious collusion between the market, art history and institutions.

Everyone lacks faith, everyone seeks confirmation.

So there has been a sort of confirmatory history which you might call canon.

And, of course, convention and history were shaped by patriarchy."

Just look at

"The History of Art"

by EH Gombrich, which is still the best-selling art book in the world, recommended everywhere for art students.

He mentions only one woman artist in the book's 688 pages.

Where is Artemisia Gentileschi?

Or Frida Kahlo?

Or O'Keeffe?

And, you only have to look at museum collections to see how disproportionately men are still there.

Once an artist is purchased by a museum, the value of his work increases.

The same happens if a temporary exhibition is offered.

Meanwhile, some female artists have left the galleries as soon as they announced they were pregnant.

They were told that people would no longer take their work seriously;

that buying their jobs was too risky because they wouldn't be as dedicated to their careers.

So women artists are really against it.

The good news is that the world is slowly starting to change.

Museums are trying to rebalance their collections.

Some even sell men's art to buy more women's art.

Auction houses are now promoting women artists, and this year's Venice Biennale weighed heavily on the presence of women.

Even collectors have noticed this.

Although prices for the work of women artists are starting from a much lower base, they are currently rising 29 percent faster than for men's art.

For savvy investors who want bargains and higher returns, this is a no-brainer.

Moreover, much of this art is wonderful.

As Bellatrix Hubert of the David Zwirner gallery in New York says: “If I look for the artists we're most interested in right now, it's mostly the women who make the best art.

Or, art that I think is more interesting".

Women do not know how to paint?

Broccoli.

Even the market tells us this.

/Telegraph/