Jerry Saltz has been waging a war on MoMA over the representation of female artists in the permanent collection. Meanwhile, the Whitney Biennial list has come out with 52% of the artists named being women. As luck would have it, 52% is the proportion of the population that is female. Hence, Saltz feels a milestone has been passed:
An art-world wall has fallen. The list of the 55 artists to be included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial was made public this morning, and 52 percent of those artists are women. Depending on where you stand, hell has frozen over, or there’s a fissure in the force. (The 2000 Biennial was made up of 36 percent women; in 2008, it was 40 percent.) When I asked curator Francesco Bonami about the unusually high percentage of women artists in his show, he said that he and associate curator, Gary Carrion-Murayari, “didn’t look for women artists. They were just in front of our eyes. It wasn’t conscious at all.” He added that it was “misleading” to think about the upcoming Biennial “in these terms.”
