Why do we ignore female artists?
Frozen out? ... Rachel Whiteread in her exhibit in the Tate turbine hall, 2005. Photograph: Graeme Turner
Everyone knows the problems with the visual art world, as indeed with all established arts hierarchies. First and foremost, it's steeped in misogyny. The artists are Great Men, worshipped in person and in print by art groupies of both sexes. Secondly, it's racist, and remains in thrall to the Anglo-American market and its expectations. Thirdly, its wealth makes it a corrupt system in which monetary value exists in an arbitrary relation to a work's artistic excellence. "Classic" big-name (male) artists get traded between old rich guys for investment purposes, much like vintage cars or deluxe properties.
But there's another tale to be told. I think we're living through a great age for art, and that today's most important artists are virtually all women. I'm thinking here of Rachel Whiteread, whose work has a contemplative stillness and breathtaking physical beauty. Consider the casts she made of the spaces under chairs and inside baths, glowing jewel-coloured resin-resembling blocks of pure pigment arrayed on a palette. Think of the house she cast in concrete. It was ridiculed, called meaningless and ugly, but it had a perky secretive humour to it, its grey lines making it look like a kid's sketch blown up to lifesize. Then there are the enigmatic white boxes filling the Tate Modern's turbine hall like a giant 3D game of Tetris, or the haunted and haunting Austrian war memorial with its lines of reverse-cast, closed books. Whiteread creates all this with total confidence, a correct knowledge of her own importance.
It's a similar story in other media. Sam Taylor-Wood's photography is pungent with glamour, its high-quality surfaces deceiving the eye into thinking it is observing a fashion shoot or a worshipping celebrity portrait. Instead, she wields a powerfully female gaze loaded with political significance. In her portraits of Robert Downey Jr and David Beckham she consciously uncovers male vulnerability and deconstructs the macho myth. Consider her boldness in the light of a photographer whom many consider (bafflingly to me) to be superior: Diane Arbus. Arbus's work, though so technically perfect that it gives you a chill, reverberates with depression. Taylor-Wood, by contrast, has a complexity and levity, a liveliness of intelligence and a technical smoothness which put her on a par with Cindy Sherman, another art world hero.
One of the greatest living young painters is the New-York based Cecily Brown, whose canvases crackle with colour. Again, that massive show at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford was a rightful acknowledgement of her importance. Her sexily sylvan scenes are disrupted in a mesh of technicolour brushstrokes, so fluid that they resemble pulsing electricity or a flagrant mash-up between all the Impressionists and all the Expressionists, ever.
It is not only that today's good artists are women and that women artists are a good thing. Their talent has art-historical significance, and traces a line of female genius. Gillian Wearing, Runa Islam, Cathy de Monchaux and ceramicist Rachel Kneebone are producing work of a depth, strength and diversity that enable us to shine a light back in recent history, illuminating the great women who came before. The experienced painters Maria Lassnig (who recently showed to tremendous acclaim at the Serpentine), Paula Rego and Maggi Hambling are three creators whose influence has become indubitable in recent years, but who were previously shoved to the side in favour of the worship of Freud and Bacon. Their work shares a vividness, a cleverness and a knowledge of human evil, so that their images sizzle with disturbing self-awareness.
On summarising all this work I am reminded time and again that all the obstacles to women come from the outer world, not the inner one. The discrimination, marginalisation, sneering, slandering and devaluing of women in every area of life is a shadow cast upon us from the outside, by those (of both sexes) who enjoy hating. But in terms of innate genius, inspiration, creativity, strength, energy and ability, we have it all.