Can we tell if art is made by a man or a woman? That was the question the Delaware Art Museum asked of its visitors in an exhibition called Battle of the Sexes, which I wrote about here last February.
The premise was this: Works by women artists were shown side by side with works by male artists of their chosing. Neither work was attributed on the wall labels, and viewers were asked to mark, on ballots, who they think made what — female or male.
On Wednesday, a week before the exhibition closes on May 22, the museum announced the “votes.”
It turns out that the voters guessed that exactly half the works were thought incorrectly to be made by the opposite sex, as you can see by reading the last column in the chart above. (Percentages above 50% are correct; below 50% are incorrect.)
The museum says that “percentages above 70 % reflect [that] the artist was working strongly within visual or material gender traditions” — that was about a quarter of the 26 artists — and that percentages between 40 and 60 % were “ambiguous.” Percentages below 40% show the artists to be “subverting gender stereotypes.”
I’m not sure what this experiment in participatory art-viewing proves. Is it curious that so view people voted? Do people care little about this subject? Are the biggest revelations to come, to the individuals who voted and would like to know how they did? Or perhaps to the artists, who may not realize whether they are turning out stereotypical works — or not?
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum