[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_31

The story of art without men, Katy Hessel, 2022

“I meant important artists, those who created great masterpieces.” This is the response you receive when you point out that many women artists have been forgotten by history. The fact that many figures have been forgotten by History seems to imply that there is a reason for their neglect.

This belief is partly due to the Myth of Merit and partly to the cognitive bias of not seeing Culture as a human process but an innate and immutable idea. The Myth of Merit has a dangerous dark side. If its basic equations are: I work hard = I achieve, I have talent = I emerge, then it is clear that those who do not achieve and do not emerge mean that they have neither worked hard nor have talent. And that's why they can't complain.

If you read the absence of women in the History of Western Art through this lens, you understand why most people are not surprised by this drastic lack of representation: if women are not there, it is because they have not worked hard and have no talent. And not because they did not have civil and legal rights. Theycould not work, manage assets, or inherit without the intercession of the male sex (sons, brothers, fathers, husbands).

“If they had done noteworthy works, they would appear in History books.” This is the second objection raised when the forgetfulness of women artists in the cultural panorama is highlighted. It also shows the cognitive bias linked to the concept of Culture as a Sacred Monster.

The history of art books, the literature anthologies, and all the scientific knowledge- by whom have they always been written? If women did not have civil and legal rights, they could not work, manage assets, or inherit; who did manage information and knowledge?

If artists like Livia Fontana and Elisabetta Sironi did not appear in Italian art books until a few years ago, it was not because they were not active in the art market of their time or they were not famous, but because those who took care of the transmission of knowledge decided not to name them, removing them from memory and therefore from History.

Culture is an ever-evolving and ever-changing human production. What we are taught, what appears in school texts, is the result of this process, and it is always the result of a choice of who to include and who to leave out.

The Victors write the saying "History" means that those who have the power to decide what History is - that is, what is worth being remembered - are less than 11% of the world population. And it’s in their interest to transmit what can maintain their power.