No More Nice Girls: Feminist Art as Revision

Abstract

Nothing says “the sixties” like the word revision. Barely anything survives in the academy that was not upended or blue-penciled in the wake of the battles of Berkeley and the Sorbonne. Revisionism, the muse of the moment, seeped into the arts like corrosive salt through a fresco. Moving with the times was easiest in the arts, where avant garde postures stand bail for serious attention to the nature of the times. Repudiation of inherited models of aesthetic worth was mistaken for redemption from the necessity of them. The fledgling feminist art movement dismissed hard-won mastery as “mere skill” and snubbed the canon of Western art as evidence of male dominion over the criteria for legitimacy and achievement. The movement rallied women whose resentments welcomed an assault on taste. Ideology gilded mediocrity—and ritual grousing—as celebrations of “women’s way of knowing.” Its boiler-plate idiom of class struggle set adrift concepts of (male) greatness. Timely academic kriegspiel, dedicated to promoting party spirit among women, validated—however inadvertently— the 1963 assertion of Leonid Ilychev, Kruschev’s spokesman for the arts: “Art belongs to the sphere of ideology.” Identity politics was In and here to stay. Much of today’s art and culture mimics the intellectual fray of the 1960s, itself an imitation of contests begun in the 1910s and 1920s. From the 1909 Futurist Manifesto to the 1963 Fluxus promise to purge the world of Acad. Quest. (2009) 22:486–490 DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9128-4